Life Work by Donald Hall

Author:Donald Hall [Hall, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9542-3
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2003-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWO

THESE LAST WORDS I wrote more than a week ago, and I wrote them on a Friday without consciousness of anxiety. Saturday I drove to Vermont and back, talking to teachers about children’s books; it was a tense day because I drove through snow, rain, hail, ice, and more snow—on April 11. When I struggled home the mail had arrived with a happy message: The Guggenheim Foundation confirmed that Jane received a fellowship for her poems—great help at a time when the economy (even a free-lancer’s) was failing; and more importantly a public acknowledgment of Jane’s work. We celebrated quietly—but not for long. Sunday morning I worked on poems and on two small essays. Monday morning Jane and I left the house early for her appointment with Dr. Sutton, by coincidence the man who removed my colon cancer two and a half years ago. Jane has had a worsening pain in her tailbone, and one doctor suspected a cyst, which magnified in our imaginations. Dr. Sutton discovered no cyst or growth, but a genetic abnormality that left the tailbone liable to injury or soreness. We drove home with lessened anxiety to find a message on the machine; I should call my internist Dr. Clark. He had bad news: In my latest blood work-up, everything looked fine except the CEA, a blood protein which marks carcinoma. Before my colon surgery the CEA count had been a seven—anything over three is worrisome—and since my surgery it had been less than two. Today it was thirty-seven.

A scan Tuesday morning, read on Wednesday, showed something in the liver; it is the liver to which colon cancer metastasizes. Wednesday morning I watched the screen during ultrasound and saw the barbell shaped darkness on the liver’s right lobe. No one knows what it is until pathology puts dyed cells under a microscope; but of course it is a metastatic lesion: Fatty tumors do not raise one’s CEA. Today, Monday, a week after the CEA report, we see Dr. Sutton again. The issue now, given what we know, is the extent of the lesion or the presence of others not discernible by ultrasound. It is common that such cancer be pervasive throughout the liver; it is common that multiple metastatic lesions remain inoperable. One undertakes chemotherapy, but the cure rate for this disease is negligible. If I cannot be operated on, I will die fairly soon. A year? Eighteen months? Six months? I speculate; I cannot stop speculating.

But my internist and the ultrasound technician, looking at the barbell shape, claim that the rest of the liver looks clear—as do the kidneys and the spleen. They’re not lying—but they know and I know that an ultrasound may not show everything. Later I discover that the barbell is one of the common shapes that a liver metastatis takes. The ultrasound technician describes it not as a barbell but as an hourglass. Ah, metaphor; do the sands run out? Maybe Dr. Sutton when he looks at the films this afternoon will find more lesions.

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