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JUN 11, 2006
TAKING
THE LUMPS
I wasn’t sure how concerned I should
be when I felt a lump
in my rump. To the best of my knowledge,
there is no such thing as cancer of the buttock. But
anytime there’s any sort of abnormal activity
in that general part of my body, I get concerned. Similarly,
I generally find any sort of
lumpish thing, anywhere on me, to be cause to freak out.
At first, it was just a little thing, but by
late last
Sunday, it was big and alarming and painful to sit on – I was like the
Princess
and the Pea, except that this thing was far larger than pea-sized, and
I’m
certainly no princess. (But maybe that
was an earlier, rejected draft of the story: “The Duke and the Lump.”)
And so I called my health insurer’s nurse line and
tried to
explain the situation as delicately as I could. I’m
not sure why I cared about not embarrassing
myself, but, well, you try saying “buttock” to a
stranger
on the phone and see if it doesn’t make you feel weird.
Seriously, try it: I mean, I’m guessing it’s
a great way to get telemarketers to leave you alone.
Anyway, I fully expected that the nurse would
tell me to go to the E.R., but she just said I should take a warm bath
and see
a doctor the next day.
On Monday, I woke up assuming that I would spend the
night
in the hospital. The lump had swollen,
but I discovered that if I sat in just the right, contorted position on
my
chair, it didn’t hurt. And really, the
pain wasn’t so bad. Far, far more
unbearable was the dread of an undiagnosed illness, of having a lump of
unknown
origin or malice.
I made it through the workday, finding lots of
excuses to
get up and walk around, and made a point of having some delicious,
greasy pizza
for lunch, assuming I’d be consuming only noxious hospital foodstuffs
for the
next few days. Late in the afternoon, I
went to the doctor’s office to meet my fate.
Thankfully, the waiting area had great reading
material,
which helped keep my mind off of the lump. Specifically,
it had the April 2006 edition of Smithsonian, the one
with lemurs on the cover, the one I
had
started to read several times in other doctor’s offices in the last few
months. I never quite got to the article
about lemurs – there was too much other interesting stuff in there,
including
pieces about Saudi Arabian youth, the search for Odysseus’s Ithaca,
that game
the Aztecs played in which the losers were beheaded (it’s called ulama, and it’s still played in certain
parts of Mexico, although everyone gets to keep their heads fully
intact these
days), and, finally, a vaguely offensive-sounding article described in
the
cover blurb as “A Gibson Girl Among the Cannibals.”
Fascinating stuff, really; I was sort of (but
not really) disappointed that my other recent trips to see doctors and
orthodontists had been so brief, and also amazed that such a genuinely
interesting magazine would repeatedly appear in the stacks of old McCall’s and Teen People and Tea
Cozy
Quarterly.
Once again I was called in to see the doctor before I
could
read much. But after the nurse took my
blood pressure and I explained to her the whole lump-on-rump thing, she
left me
to wait for the doctor alone. Bored, I
looked examined my surroundings and noticed several toenails on the
floor, all
of which appeared to be chewed off. I
didn’t know whether to be just disgusted or disgusted and impressed,
so I started digging through the room’s pile of
yellowing magazines, hoping to find the lemurs once again.
And so I did. And so it
was absolutely fascinating, so much so
that I nearly forgot
about the throbbing pain on which I sat. But
before I could finish the article, the doctor
arrived to commence
the poking and prodding and grave pronouncements and calling of
ambulances.
And yet, amazingly, that’s not what happened. Oh yes, there was poking and prodding and
murmuring. But the lump, he seemed to
think, was not of much concern. Just an
abscess. “Just” being a relative term,
of course – an abscess is still not something you really want, at all,
even if
it’s not cause for complete and utter panic. He
called the colon/rectal specialist on call, who
said I should try to
see a surgeon the next day. In
clinic. Not in the operating room. In a nice, friendly, anesthesia-free room
with tacky art. And magazines.
As I waited for the doctor to return
from his phone call and
tell me all of this, I heard a sudden commotion in the hallway. Sprinting nurses is never a good sign. A few moments later, I heard someone
breathing loudly, quickly, terrifyingly fast, the drumroll of gasps
signaling
an asthma attack. She was sixteen. I know this because the nurse asked her how
old she was, and that was her response, drawn out over several
desperate
breaths, the word loaded with emotion, her fraught tone indicating two
unspoken
thoughts: “Please don’t make me try to talk” and “Please let me make it
to seventeen.”
My lump seemed fairly inconsequential all of a
sudden, to me
and also to the doctor, who rushed in, explained to me that the
specialist’s
comments relayed over the phone, and told me they “had some other
things to
deal with.” Down the hall, different
nurses kept saying that an ambulance was on its way, but I could tell
that
everyone was afraid that, even though the hospital was a block away,
she might
not make it.
I left, thrilled to spend the night in my own bed,
but
haunted by the gasps. As I walked back
toward the waiting room, the sounds faded with the distance, but I
listened for
them as long as I could – terrifying though they were, I was even more
scared
that they might stop suddenly. As I
exited the parking lot, I noticed an ambulance parked in front of the
building,
giving me hope that maybe the sixteen-year-old would pull through, and
putting
my worries back on my own pain.
I wasn’t able
to get in to see the specialist
(a.k.a. Dr. Suave, mentioned
in the previous post) until two days later. And
so it was that on Wednesday, as on Monday, I awoke with the dread of a
condemned man, certain that the next few
hours would be my last outside of a hospital for a while.
When I arrived at Dr. Sauve’s office at 9:50 a.m., there were no Smithsonians
and Creed was playing on the loudspeakers. I
knew it was going to be a bad day.
Amazingly, it wasn’t. Instead of sending me off to the chopping
block, the doctor took a quick look, a quick poke, and wrote me a
prescription
for some antibiotics. That was it. (Best of all, since the abscess was external,
he didn’t have to do, er, a full examination.)
The bump’s still there, but not painful anymore, and
it’s
clearly subsiding. The pills are the
no-alcohol-or-your-colon-falls-out
kind, but I figure that’s a small price to pay for not being slashed
open and
confined to a hospital bed. It’s not
like there’s happy hour in a hospital, anyway. And now, I'm free
to go to the library and find out all I want about lemurs.
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