#1. The Rochester Urologist
Name and date of birth and wait and soon you’re inside once again. It's air-conditioned cool and production line efficient. The technician's checking vials and needles on the silver tray. She looks African. A colored scarf wound around her head, long thinly platted dreds and bracelets on her wrists. I offer the inside of my arm. She speaks softly in a thick dark voice and I hardly feel the prick.
“Where are you from?”, I ask.
“The DRC”, she says.
“The Democratic Rebublique of the Congo”. I say. And she looks up surprised.
“King Leopold. The Belgium Congo. Very bad”, I continued “ very bad.”
“It was very bad” she says, and not looking at me makes a chopping motion across her wrist. "The colonialists cut off our hands.” she said.
They cut off their hands for stealing. We were together, confined in this gray phlebotomy cubicle in Rochester and all of a sudden historical pictures of atrocities flickered across the walls and I reached and touched her arm.
A few weeks earlier I’d been sitting in a Greek Diner in Walton, New York. A real Diner like from the olden days, aluminum and glass and tiles, run by Greeks too. It was closed for years but suddenly burst open one day and was packed. I was eating a Greek salad. She had moussaka. My phone lit up and I answered and it was my new primary care doctor. I could hardly hear her.
We'd just come from the hospital near the County Fair Grounds and I've been there before; yellow jacket wasp attack, log splitter injuries but nothing really serious. Sometimes things move quickly because 30 minutes ago, they've taken blood and my doctor calls me in the diner and says:
"Listen closely, you need to find an emergency room right now. Are you listening?" I need to find an emergency room? I pass the phone to my guardian angel.
There was to be no emergency room that day. But the doctor was right to call. The recent blood test indicated chronic kidney disease - it was pretty bad - on the edge of dialysis. But had been like this for some time and I had grown used to the slow growing malaise. When the bladder ceases to void properly -- I was drowning inside and had been for years. And so began another chapter with the Rochester Urologist.
Finally I’d relented and agreed. Of course she was right. But it was a long time coming. Been feeling bad for years, Won’t go into details. She suggested we meet half way in Cortland.
Driving these days we use GPS. I don’t have to tell you. Most of us are plugged in; electronics, satellites, radio signals manifesting sound and pictures, a form of quantum entanglement except you don’t know where you are or where you’re going half the time. You’re plugged in but you don’t know where you’re going.
The plan was meet halfway in Cortland but I missed the turn. Instead of Cortland I took Corning. Instead of sailing to Syracuse, I was heading westward for Ithaca and when finally I emerged, found myself at the wrong end of an equilateral triangle equidistant from the starting point and destination.
Now driving north and east, the winding highway and the softness and the trees bucolic bursting after all the rain these hot mid summer days. And more names gliding past. Homer’s out there somewhere and Marathon and Virgil too and Dryden. An odyssey through Central New York where settlers took Indian land after the Revolutionary War. The Surveyor General parceled it out in 1790 thereabouts. Indian land. Of course. He was a classical scholar. Wouldn’t you know.
There are guardian angels in this world and more than one has crossed my path. I apologized and she said:
“Take your time and be careful.
I’ll find a place to park.
Call me when you’re close.
Don’t worry.
I’ll play Wordle”.
And there she was waiting in the gray Ford Hybrid Truck. He parked the rusty Pathfinder in the lot near McDonalds. He tapped on the window. She unlocked the doors. He threw his bag on the back seat and climbed in. They headed north and west towards Lake Ontario and Rochester, the home of Eastman Kodak and Genesee beer, a city of universities, neat hospitals and lilac trees and Frederick Law Olmsted gardens and parks laid out and old oak trees, Susan B Anthony, Fredrick Douglas and the cradle graves. Solid brick and modest wooden homes and bungalows, shady streets and a neighborhood pub on the corner.
The reception room was familiar. He gave his details through the glass petition: name and date of birth and they sat and they waited. Five years earlier was the first time, when the Rochester Urologist shook his head and looking up at her then at him said: ‘He really shouldn’t be here”.
The prostate cancer was imbedded and contained for more than a quarter century like a fossil, He’d survived and lived and loved but more recently felt his flame flickering. A warning before the fire dies. He was nearly eighty years old for Christ’s sakes.
Snapping on his gloves and lubing up once again, the Rochester Urologist motioned at the examination table and went about his business. And confirmed once again.
“ Hard as a rock”, he exclaimed.
My guardian angel watches over these necessary indignities. The system moves smoothly, no friction, things work. The Rochester Urologist drives his keyboard fast loading data into the machine - he’s quick and concentrated and finally looks up and asks:
“No radiation or chemo?”
He already knows the answer.
I did at least five years of traditional Chinese medicine with Dr Wong in Chinatown, New York. I swallowed vitamins and pumpkin seeds and green juice and thick, brown, bitter tea. And I tried Tai Chi and white witches and cleansing diets and even visited the back blocks of the Western Catskills on the Delaware near the Pennsylvania border where a cult practiced the Gerson Method. And I headed into the garden out from under the fluorescent lights and chatter into the quiet and the birds and the stolid beauty of stone. And through those years of hard physical work, love and exploration I believe my body healed.
But with age comes plumbing problems - as they say - the mind may be willing but the hydraulics not so much. And so came kidney time. I learned I was drowning inside.
“On which leg would you like it?”
The nurse asked.
"Breath in through your nose
and out through your mouth”,
the nurse says as the plumbing repairs proceed.
“It’s numbing jelly just like at the dentist.
You don’t have a latex allergy do you?”
She inserts the catheter.
I don’t feel a thing.
And now comes the bag.
She straps it onto my thigh
Like a gun.
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