The History of Living Forever by Jake Wolff

Author:Jake Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

13

My Husband’s Diagnosis

The day after my husband’s medical chip sounded its alarm, we went together to the doctor. My husband’s case history was downloaded from the chip, blood tests were taken, MRIs administered. We sat in the doctor’s office, where he had all the scans displayed on the screen behind him—rotating, glowing, color coded. He was older, early eighties, the only doctor in Winterville.

My husband’s brain looked like a fetus in ultrasound: rounded and small with the potential for bigness. A depthless gray—the color of the ocean in winter. Our doctor swept his hands across it like a weatherman tracking a storm system. “You have a pontine glioma. Which means you have a cancerous tumor on your brain stem.”

“I want a second opinion,” my husband joked.

To my surprise, our doctor took it as one and smiled. “Listen, if we were having this conversation ten, twenty years ago, I would be telling you to call your loved ones and make arrangements. That’s how bad this was.”

I squeezed my husband’s hand. “But now we can go home, make dinner, and it will go away on its own?”

“Ha.” The doctor tapped his computer and sent some literature to our phones: Difficult Cancers of the Brain. “The difference is we could never operate on these, but now we can. It’s all chip guided.”

My husband was touching dumbly, adorably, at the back of his head, as though he might feel the tumor pushing through his skull. “So what’s next?”

“Before we consider surgery, we try radiation. It probably won’t work, but that’s where we start.”

I looked up from my phone. “This says we should go straight to surgery. As soon as possible.”

Our doctor looked surprised. “You read fast.”

I could feel my husband watching me, glowing with pride. He loved this side of me—this smart, bumptious kid who would do intellectual combat with anyone. Through his eyes, I loved it in myself.

“It’s true that it says that. But the people who wrote that are out of touch. They’ve only seen the brain through a computer.” The doctor was talking to himself as much as to us. “The brain seems like such a powerful thing, but I’m telling you, when you pop open the skull and see one, it’s just a little raisin in there.”

“So you’re saying surgery is riskier than the pamphlet says?” asked my husband, trying to mediate.

The doctor sat forward in his seat. “I’m saying a lot can go wrong. You could come out a different person. Or with slurred speech. Or not able to open your eyes.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a euphemism for being dead or if he meant my husband’s eyelids might actually stop working.

So we scheduled the radiation and went home. I told my husband to sit, relax, let me make dinner. French onion soup—his favorite. But he stayed in the kitchen with me while I cooked, which is exactly what I wanted. When it was ready, we wrapped ourselves in blankets and ate our soup outside. We watched some fat squirrels chase each other up and down the trees.

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