Perspective

Waaay back when we started this blog, I remember thinking that since I have such an active, fertile imagination, I could - if I wanted to - imagine how awful it must be for someone to go through a natural disaster and lose the people they love. Like my hero Bartleby, I preferred not to.

I'd really like my imagination to just take a little break now and again. A couple of weeks ago, my brother-in-law, a brash, obnoxious, totally lovable New Yorker hailing from Brooklyn, had surgery to remove a malignant tumor the size of an orange from his lower intestine, and about two feet of colon along with it. You ought to see the scar; it's insane. It starts in the center of his chest, just under the solar plexus, and goes down like a zipper sewn in by a drunken tailor, to just above the happy trail, which is, I gather, not so happy at the moment.

So he had the surgery and the margins were clean and we were all happy and hell, Jimmy's going back to work in two weeks! Everything's back to normal.

Except it's not. Nowhere close.

He has two spots on his liver. At first They couldn't identify them - then decided it was cancer, and started him on either radiation or chemo immediately. Don't know which - this is all being filtered through my husband, who is less concerned with details and more concerned about his sister, who was, as of last night, officially freaking out.

Once They saw the two spots, the next question became whether it was liver cancer, or colon cancer that had spread to the liver. And then They had to figure out how far it had spread.

So off my brother- and sister-in-law went to the oncologist yesterday, to have a look at the results.

I don't know what they were, specifically. My father-in-law's text last night was highly melodramatic and I won't repeat it because it doesn't do any good to say something like that about a fifty-year-old man with two young daughters and a family history of fast-growing terminal cancer.

What I do know is that they're putting him on hard-core chemo for two weeks, then operating again. On his liver.

Goddamn it.

I understand how people turn to God in times like these - really, I do. Because that way, you at least feel like you can do something useful - you can pray. At the moment, I don't feel like I can do anything at all. Not for Jimmy, not for Christie, not for their daughters Addison and Cadyn. And I don't know what to do for Brian, who has known Jimmy since adolescence and is spending a lot of time in the backyard in the evenings, talking on the phone with his father, and drinking.

Maybe we can get an increase on our credit limit. That way, if we need to get there quickly, we can. I can't think of anything else to do. Tearing my hair out and screaming at the top of my lungs at this brutal injustice will do nothing but wreck my vocal cords.

See, when Brian and I are faced with something bad - like surgery on the cat or the dog, like impending foreclosure, like being too broke to afford child care - one of us is always able to say, "It's okay, honey. Everything's going to be all right."

But that's in the blue sky period, when nothing's certain, when the vet can still save a leg or a paw, when the fight with the mortgage company isn't over quite yet, when the biopsy hasn't come back from the doctor and it's probably nothing to worry about anyway. It's scary to think that compared to what my sister-in-law and her husband are going through right now, at this very moment, those things are a walk in the fucking park.

I came into work this morning and one of my co-workers was bitching as he usually does about something or other, it was all I could do not to offer him a big, heaping plate of Shut The Fuck Up. "Harry," I wanted to say, "you're reasonably healthy, although God knows you could drop dead of a heart attack at any second. Any of us could. Your daughter is grown up and healthy. You have a job, and you're fit enough to do it. You own your own goddamned house. So get some perspective and shut the fuck up."

I wish I could say to my husband that everything's going to be all right. But I can't. I wouldn't believe it, and neither would he.