Patrimony by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781446400234
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

A few days later we got the second opinion, and my father preferred it to the first. Vallo Benjamin, a neurosurgeon at NYU Hospital in Manhattan, had agreed to fit us in at the request of David Krohn, who had described him to me as “world-class.” Benjamin was an authoritative, worldly man of about my age, a smartly dressed, dark-eyed foreigner, virilely good-looking in the forthright school of Picasso, whom he resembled. He listened to the medical history my father recounted, asked if he got headaches or dizzy spells, then touched the point of a pin to the two sides of my father’s face to determine how much feeling he’d lost on the bad side. Benjamin looked to be scrutinizing him very carefully as my father answered all the questions, asked his own questions, and waited to hear if a stay of execution might be granted and his sentence lifted, leaving him free to feel as though he were forty again. “I feel like forty” was something he’d told everyone, even on days when it wasn’t true, until just a few months back.

Benjamin stuck the MRI pictures of the brain up on the lighted screen behind his desk and told me to come around and take a look at them with him. My father sat docilely beside Lil, holding in his hand his piece of paper with the list of questions, while the doctor, speaking so softly that only I could hear, traced a finger over the pictures to show me the extensiveness of the tumor. Strictly speaking, he said, it wasn’t a brain tumor. Probably it had begun as a tumor on a facial nerve and grown to where now it was not only pushing against the brain stem but extruding through the bone at the back of the nose. Meyerson had estimated that it would take eight to ten hours to operate and had called the operation routine. Now I was told that it would more likely take thirteen or fourteen hours and that the operation involved working where all the arteries and nerves are massed together—“tricky terrain,” the doctor said. “Are you telling me it’s impossible?” I asked him. “Not at all,” he snapped back, as though I had impugned his expertise. “It can be done, of course.”

When we sat back down, my father said to Benjamin, “Doctor, I have a friend in the building. His brother-in-law had a tumor like this and they radiated it. Used radiation and it went away. I’m not saying that would solve everything, be permanent. But if I could just have another couple of years …”

“Mr. Roth,” he replied, very gently, “I don’t know if radiation would be effective until I know the kind of tumor we’re dealing with. To know that, I need, in addition to these pictures, a CAT scan to give us a picture of the skull as well as the situation with the brain. I then need a biopsy of the tumor. Yours could be one of

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