“Cancer.”
I sat there, letting those two syllables slither their way through my ear canal, looking for a place to reside. But the word didn’t want to be heard. I was in denial. It simply could not be true. Maybe that’s why I remained still with a delirious smile on my face.
Cancer, what a funny sounding word. Who decided that’s what such a nemesis should be called? Innocent enough sounding letters, even when recited over and over again, its malevolence remains disguised in its innocuous tautology. And there I was, infested with it. I imagined my innards like those little white dots in the Ms. Pacman game. A game in which Mia and I would spend countless hours playing when we were younger; when confrontation with eminent death had never been considered. I pictured Ms. Pacman as cancer, eating away at me with an appetite impossible to whet.
“Aggressive.” The doctor had thrown more twisting words my way. I know these words, I’m a smart woman. My I.Q was tested as a child, and I scored somewhere around the borderline of genius (not bragging, just saying). Some genius, huh? I’m thirty-four, and I’ve spent thirty-four years of my life working. Only working. I was traveling on the map laid out for the life of Olivia Gardner.
From the second we’re born there’s a mounting pressure to live, and progress. Learn to talk, learn to walk, learn everything you need to know to be a competent adult. You (I) must go to school, make friends if you can, but if not don’t fret, your books are the only friends you need. You (I) must take those books, learn from them, learn from your teachers, get straight A’s and stand above the rest. Graduate with honors. Suffer through the times of being called a nerd and hopefully realize that high school isn’t where life begins and ends. You (I) must take those grades, and use them to go away for more schooling, where professors have agendas and cram their ideologies down your throat with an iron fist. You’ll have to ween your way through and find your own voice, your own thoughts, and where your own ideas lie. They’ll be parties for you to cut loose at, but you (I) won’t have time to go and cut much of anything. They’ll be an exam rearing its ugly head over your shoulder, and you’ll feel the need, or better yet, the compulsion to be studiously ready for it. Because hey, they’ll be time for parties and a life outside of school when you’re an accomplished adult, right?
Wrong.
When you’re an adult you better get yourself a well paying job. You better show them what all that hard work had accomplished. It should come with a title that earns you cache’ when you say it, such as: “I’m a lawyer.” “I’m a doctor.” “I’m everything you’ve ever wanted to be.”
Until now, because now, “I’m dying.”
What I was, was an entrepreneur. At dinner parties filled with the rich and obnoxious, I’d sling that word out like a samurai sword. It carried a kind of decadence to it; a prestige. They’d respond, “Ooooh, you own your own business,” saying it like half a question to make sure they were right about what an entrepreneur was. “Why, yes I do,” I’d respond, just as pretentiously as they would.
I developed my own ad agency from the bottom up. I poured every ounce of energy I had into it. Along with every waking minute, and dedicating each of its sixty-seconds to making my business grow. And boy did it ever.
It started with me and I alone, constructing ads for local businesses and Mom n’ Pop stores in town. People would ask the owners, “Where’d you come up with that ad? It’s clever.” The owner would say, “Olivia Gardner, remember her? She grew up here in Yorktown.” That’s when I had them, my hometown of Yorktown Heights, New York. It was quite the infectious movement, spreading its way like my newly found cancer through Westchester County. I began hiring people, renting office space and…
Blah, blah, blah.
How about I skip this part? I most certainly don’t have the time for it. Long story short, I’m the youngest CEO in the business, going from designing ads for the local bike shop, to developing a new ad campaign for Nike.
Whoop-de--doo, right? What did it all amount to?
“Terminal”
Okay, that word stuck. The doctor looked at me with narrowing eyes, an understanding of death exhumed out of them. How many times had this man told another person they were dying? What kind of job is that? Is he the messenger for Death?
“So you’re saying that’s that?” I asked him, still showing no weakness or understanding.
“I’m saying, Ms. Gardner, that the odds are stacked against you.”
Fucking lung cancer, can you believe it? I’d never smoked a thing in my life. Seriously, nothing; not even the faintest drag of a cigarette. I think the doctor said something about a gene mutation, but that was amongst my self-rambling thoughts of Ms. Pacman. All of those years I spent avoiding the things I deemed dangerous seemed not to matter, because I have a mutation, and not a cool one like from a comic book either. This mutation is trying to kill me.
The morning I knew something was wrong was like any other morning. I woke up, had my coffee, answered some emails and then went for my morning jog. The air was brisk and still. Besides for the sound of birds making their daily chirps and melodies, it was quiet. Cars stayed parked, people stayed inside, the world was docile. It felt as if I was jogging through a painting. Maybe that’s the way Death likes it. Maybe he wants you all to himself.
Amidst mile two is when my breathing began to labor. Wheezing, I mustered through it, and coughed up a wad of phlegm. I was running too fast to notice the blood inside of it. Mile three came and went, though I’d never been that winded after three miles before. During mile four I began to choke. There was a blockage. I staggered, trying to breathe, but my lungs refused to cooperate. It reminded me of the time I fell from a tree when I was ten-years old. I had landed flush on my back and knocked the wind out of myself. This was like that, only more violent, with far more blood. I coughed it up and into my hand. I stared at it like it was a magic trick. It seemed too bizarre to be real.
Then came the dark. I had blacked out on the street.
“Options?” I asked, throwing out one word sentences of my own. Take that Doc!
“Honestly, I say you only have one, immediate chemotherapy.”
I was lost, looking at this man’s degrees hanging on the wall behind him. Most of them were crooked. He was probably in the same boat as me. He must have spent his whole life filling those frames, while his office remained empty of frames filled with family and loved ones.
Where was this guy’s bed side manner anyway? Too bad they don’t give out plaques for that.
“And what are the odds it would even work?”
The doctor had made a thinking man’s pose: his fist studiously tucked under his chin, supporting his boulder like head, his beady eyes off in the distance as if the mind behind them was in the middle of some massive calculation only brainiacs could compute.
I couldn’t help but think of my dad. Not that this man reminded me of him, if only it were that. My father, Oliver Gardner, died of cancer seven years before my diagnosis. But the man who died that day was only the shell of my father. In reality, my dad died a year before. The man who laid in that hospice bed—in the living-room of the house I grew up in—had dissolved. The pride of that man was the first thing to go, and it became replaced with a shrinking courage for a growing weakling.
“Five percent, possibly ten.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. “So what you’re saying is that I have a ninety-five, or if I’m lucky a ninety percent chance of death?”
The doc shrugged his shoulders.
“How long? How long do I have?”
Miscellaneous numbers entered my skull like bulldozers: five, four, three, one year? I prepared myself to hear an hour.
“Without treatment, maybe a little over a year. With it, there’s a chance to extend your time, and a chance is better than none.”
“I’ve seen the treatment. I’ve seen what it does. If we extended my time, what’s the quality of life I’d have?”
“It depends on how your body accepts it. This is a lot to take in, Ms. Gardner, I know. But you should talk with your family and figure out your best course of action.”
I hated the way he talked. It was as if he was a telemarketer, reading rebuttals to me from a computer screen inches in front of his face. If the potential costumer replies with this… be sure to counter with…
That’s when the catatonic state won the civil war of my mind. I froze, captured in a prison of racing thoughts. Claustrophobia gripped me like a stranglehold. His office had no windows, and no natural light. There was only the ambulatory buzz of fluorescent lights above my head, playing the one note theme song for the waiting room of the damned. I needed air, but was too confused to move.
I stared blankly for minutes. The doctor cleared his throat when the minutes turned from long to awkward. I stared at him. I suppose my stare was daring, because he shrank away from it. A confrontation with the dead was one he could not win.
“I’m sorry, Olivia, but I have another appointment to get to,” I think is what he said, but it was hard to tell.
Everything came crashing down on me. The stories of a life that could never be told, the experiences that could never be lived; their thoughts weighed ungodly tons on my back. I realized I hadn’t said a word in some time, and the doctor was still trying to push me out of his office. He came across the desk and along side of me, lifted me up by the elbows, and guided me to the door, where life’s contemplations awaited outside and away from him.
The door opened and I felt sunlight touch my skin from the windows of the hall. It was warm but somehow threatening. The idea of it eventually turning cold, turned my stomach along with it.
“Talk to your family, and set an appointment with my secretary,” he said, as his last guided nudge put me past the threshold of his door, and out of his world. All I heard next was the door closing behind me.
There was only one thing I could say, only one word that held the aesthetic force of how I felt. I said it softly in my mind, but shouted it at the top of my wilting lungs through the halls of the building, echoing off the tiles, through the nurse’s station, and into the waiting room, where other would-be victims awaited such terrible news.
“FUCK!”
(Click on chapter heading for comments)