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Latest Voices
April More Voices: Scars
Dear readers,
My physical scars are hardly worth mentioning. I have a scar on my back where a surgeon removed a lipoma–a fatty lump the size of a golf ball–twenty years ago. On my abdomen, I have a few smaller, more recent scars from laparoscopic prostate surgery.
I’m lucky. The scars don’t bother me. Hardly anyone notices them. And if I’m wearing a bathing suit, the appearance of a scar on a man suggests something heroic–a wound inflicted in battle–rather than a sign of vulnerability or an imperfection that detracts from physical beauty.
Others aren’t so fortunate.
The Portal
“Hello?” I answered the yellow phone with its coiled cord dangling from the kitchen wall. To my surprise, my doctor was calling ME, a seventh grader, with results of my blood tests. (Mono.) I still recall my shock that a doctor – practically a celebrity! – would call my home. Shouldn’t his staff be calling?
When the Doctor Lacks Compassion
It was a lump in my groin, discovered in the shower, that brought me to the doctor’s office. “Likely a hernia,” he said. “Let’s schedule surgery.” He seemed calm and unworried, and I expected the best.
When the phone rang several days post-surgery, he said, “I’m sorry to tell you it’s cancer: non-Hodgkins lymphoma.” I dropped the phone on the floor and started to scream—not scream but howl. I was 37 and had two young girls. His words pierced me as if I were on a firing line. Am I going to die? stampeded through my brain.
My Hardest Words
My father exhibited some goofy language errors during a phone conversation, substituting sound-alike words two to three times over a ten-minute period. I called my brother, and we made a seventy-minute drive to take him to the emergency room. The resident physician suspected a stroke, and Dad went for an MRI. Stroke seemed like a pipedream as his symptoms were not clear. The MRI came back, and the resident back-pedaled as the new findings looked more like tumor than stroke. I confirmed what part of the brain was involved, his risk for seizure, and the follow-up treatment plan.
The In-Between
In that space between the knowing and the not knowing, that mezzanine containing neither a safe room nor a hall of horrors, within that space the fear took on a life of its own.
Self Treatment
His broad, open smile met me as I walked into the exam room. I noticed his feet didn’t quite reach the floor, and he was wearing sandals. His feet were wide and squarish, the type of feet one would get from going barefoot their entire life. The type of feet my yoga teacher always asked us to emulate with toes spread wide and space between each digit.
There Wasn’t a Biopsy
During dinner with an oncologist friend, she noticed a lump at the front of my neck. “Likely a thyroid cyst,” she said, “nothing to worry about,” and explained that an ultrasound would differentiate a cystic from a solid lesion.
Deceiving Patients to Dampen Pain: A Chinese Family’s “Good Lie”
It had been a long time since I’d seen my grandmother. I was seventeen and traveling to Shanghai, where she resided. My grandmother had helped raise me. All throughout my childhood, she and I would share a feast of foodstuffs, their scalding scents curling through the house. In the afternoons, we would scamper down winding forest trails. This was how I remembered her: vigorous, strong. Now, years later, entering her Shanghai apartment, I noticed the unfamiliar way she hunched into herself. Her sunken cheeks. Her body stiff and frail, almost shaking.
Positive
Thirty-two years ago, I was the mom of a toddler and a baby. I’d found a spot above my left eyebrow that hadn’t healed and that was itchy. I went to a dermatologist (that’s another story) and had a biopsy. A couple of weeks later, a message was left on my answering machine: The biopsy was positive; the lesion was skin cancer.
