Habit (16 page)

Ma thinks Doctor Lawson is a genius, because he's very sympathetic to her aversion to permanent colostomy. He quickly slotted her as one of those patients who'd rather die than have a bag, and he's right. This is why she moved on from Pete, who was recommending a simpler procedure, the one I still think she should have. Ma kept looking around for more opinions—she would not have agreed to do anything at all if this Lawson fellow hadn't promised a new (albeit temperamental) rectum, and she thinks it's very
negative
of me to assume the worst about this plan. I just want her to be able to have a life: overnight trips to the church in Carlisle, lunch dates with friends.

Ma's been too discreet to get into the details with Doctor Lawson. When we scheduled the operation, I was overjoyed she had finally agreed to do something, and I figured we'd sort out the specifics later. But at this point, I can't decide whether I want to hug Lawson or kick him. The man's office is like Fort Knox. He won't correspond with me by email the way Pete did, and he hasn't responded to my phone calls and messages. Surgery is on Monday, and if it weren't for today's appointment, I'd be plotting to throw myself across his operating table, demanding an audience.

The more we sit here, the crankier we get. There's a flat screen in the corner of the waiting room. It plays nothing but irritating ads on a loop: soft gauzy lighting showing how happy everyone is frolicking through the leafy meadows, all hopped up on their breakthrough medicines. Around the corner near the door leading to the exam rooms, there is a small, hopeful cluster of professionals dressed for success with their briefcases full of drug samples: pharmaceutical salespeople, waiting to pounce on any doctors that appear.

We haven't had time to shop for black nun clothes yet. Ma's been determinedly wearing the darkest nightshirt she has every day since the tonsure, along with that cloth thing with the red embroidered Greek lettering. She is harrumphing through the one piece of reading material in the room, a pamphlet with dull hospital news. I'm playing Spider Solitaire on my phone and beginning to worry about the battery reserve.

A noise is coming from the lower rib-cage area of a woman sitting at my other side. There is a crackly, ventriloquistic tone to it, like she's hidden a walkie-talkie up her shirt and someone on the other end is passing gas into it. The woman pokes herself and it stops. I have been hearing about issues with gas in colostomy bags. The sound does seem more disturbing than your average run-of-the-mill fart:
unnatural,
as Ma would say. It's a good thing Ma's hearing aid doesn't work well, or she'd really want to make a dash for it. It has now been an hour and a half since we got here.

Ma shifts in her wheelchair.

—This is ridiculous.

—What?

—There's no point.

—What are you talking about, Ma, this appointment or the surgery?

—Both. I feel fine. Let's go home.

Aargh. I go up to nice little Cindy behind the desk, the one who took all my messages, the messages Lawson never answered.

—Excuse me, my mother is so tired of waiting that she has decided to go home now and not have her surgery after all.

—Just a minute, says Cindy, as if this happens nine or ten times a day. She calls back to see if we are next. We are, and it should only be a few more minutes.

Twenty minutes later, I'm down to one bar on my phone, and Ma says
get me out of here, this is ridiculous, why can't I go home.
I get ready to say what I have said a thousand times before because she keeps forgetting that
shrunken rectal tumors grow back and cause bowel obstructions, which lead to everything backing up. What can't go down must come up, remember, and you'll be begging anyone available to remove that tumor. What's more, by then it will have spread to your lungs, liver, and bones. Lungs are okay because it's like drowning, which is manageable with morphine. Cancer in your liver is bearable, but bones, forget it. Cancer in your bones feels like rats chewing on you, and they say the painkillers can't do a thing. Four out of five doctors have told you that it's all very well to say avoiding surgery is a reasonable course to take when you're old and frail. It's not when you have a rectal tumor.

But this lady with the walkie-talkie rib cage is right next to us, and because of the bad hearing aid, I'd have to shout. So I go back to the desk and tell little Cindy that I have to wheel my mother out of range and talk her off a ledge again.

We find a quiet corner and start with
what can't go down
and so forth.

—It's all right, Ma says. That's what happened to Grandsir and he was fine, he just went ahead and died.

(It has been bothering me, this business about my grandfather's mysterious but horrible death and its similarity to what we're dealing with. Mental note: Schedule my own colonoscopy when the surgery crisis is over.)

We switch to
chewing rats
.

—Nonsense, I have a very high pain threshold, and besides, my cancer tea may be working. Let's go home.

Sigh.

—Ms. von Munch-spritzer?

It's Doctor Lawson's assistant Gina, not a moment too soon. She leads us past the hovering salespeople toward the inner sanctum. Ma tries to ditch the wheelchair on the way, probably so she can hide her current feeble state, which might cause Lawson to reconsider his new rectum offer and suggest the permanent bag instead.

We pass several office staff members in the hall, and it may be my imagination, but they all seem to be trying to keep very busy and not notice us. These people are most likely victims of my recent increasingly tetchy phone and email assault. Ignoring us is not an easy feat, what with the wheelchair and the two gigantic Memory Foam seat cushions that we keep forgetting about and leaving all over the place, Ma's weird nun thing around her neck, my huge red file folder not to mention our mutual state of seething agitation. We are like an enormous pulsating Rose Bowl float trying to maneuver around the corners jammed tight with workstations that seem to have mushroomed haphazardly in tiny pockets here and there outside the exam rooms. The rectal reconstruction business must be positively booming.

Lawson's personal office is surprisingly homey. Here we wait again, this time on comfy leather chairs. Ma has abandoned the wheelchair after all because there's no room for it here, but I've managed to park it conspicuously outside the door. There are many personal touches surrounding Lawson's enormous desk and his computer with emails on the screen (wish I could get close enough to make a note of his direct address).

—Look at the drawings by his children, aren't they lovely? says Ma. He obviously has his values in order, Susie, don't you think?

Ma knows I'm still hung up on the last surgeon Pete's superior communication skills, and she's trying to bring me around. Lawson's children appear to somehow sense their father's patients' need for reassurance while they wait, because the wall by his computer is lined with their drawings and notes:

Mostly
nice?

Back on the wall in a corner by me, where Ma can't see it, there is something that looks like a stone tablet carved with unreadable words. Hebrew? I'm interested to know if Lawson is Jewish and if so, how this will figure with Ma. I can't decide whether it will help or hurt to call her attention to it.

Ma is cooing over the children's drawings. There's a handout on the desk describing the procedure. Instead of wasting more battery life on Spider Solitaire, I decide to check this out.

TATA (pronounced the way it looks, like ta-ta!) was a big breakthrough back in the day. Also known as
transanal abdominal transanal radical prosigmoidectomy with descending coloanal anastamosis,
the surgery involves two stages. First you get your cancer removed, a new rectum is built using a healthy piece of your colon, and you receive a temporary colostomy to give it all a chance to heal. Second stage, some months later, they take away the temporary bag, reconnect your plumbing, and teach you how to work your new rectum. Pretty wonderful in theory but I'm convinced it's not for Ma.

The wait drags on, and I check Colette's list of questions:
“How many eighty-five-year-old people have you done this to who didn't end up incontinent?”
I'm beginning to work myself up with some pretty mean thoughts like,
Who does he think he is? He's younger than me. Okay, he's got a nice office and he's all busy and everything, but this could easily be a smokescreen. I'm not about to let some whippersnapper use my mother as a guinea pig.

I look around the room again, and that's when I see it. How could I have missed this before: a rather large wooden sign, displayed prominently on a bookshelf—a gift from a former patient? It takes up quite a bit of space, so Lawson must really like it:

Nobody gets in to see the wizard!

Not nobody!

Not nohow!

All of a sudden, everything becomes extremely clear.

I was Glinda the Good Witch in
The Wizard of Oz
in high school. I've watched it thousands of times with the kids. I could jump out of my chair and perform the exact choreography of the Lollipop Guild dance for you right this second if you needed me to.

The Wizard of Oz lives in the Emerald City. Dorothy and her friends go there for help. The Gatekeeper is played by the same actor who plays the Wizard—the point being that the Wizard turns out to be a big fake, or Humbug, who can't actually help them at all. Glinda has to come to the rescue in the end. But we find that out later.

Here's what happens at the gate:

They ring the bell. The Gatekeeper opens a little door and sticks his head out, perturbed.

Gatekeeper: Who rang that bell?

Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion: We did!

Gatekeeper: Can't you read?

Scarecrow: Read what?

Gatekeeper: The notice!

Dorothy and Scarecrow: What notice?

Gatekeeper: It's on the door—as plain as the nose on my face! It—Oh . . .

He hangs the notice and goes back inside.

Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion (
reading notice
): Bell out of order, please knock.

Dorothy knocks. The Gatekeeper sticks his head out again.

Gatekeeper: Well, that's more like it! Now, state your business.

When they explain that they want to see the Wizard, because the Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man wants a heart, and so forth—I probably don't have to make this any clearer.

Gatekeeper:
Nobody gets in to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not nohow!

And boy is that ever right. I've been trying to get Ma this final consultation for the past month. It is only by some miracle that we have slipped in under Gina's and Cindy's fierce radar. My mother has no ruby slippers (they are not a part of the nun uniform), but she does definitely want to go home
and
she wants a new rectum. Unfortunately, I am not Glinda the Good Witch, I just played her in high school. Suddenly, it's cataclysmically clear that we're not the first people to have to claw our way in for an audience with the Great and Powerful Wizard of Franklin Hospital.

In fact, other patients have been here in Lawson's incongruously welcoming private chamber before us, many in crisis themselves. And at least one of them
must
have come out the other end okay at some point (possibly in diapers or making farty-crackly noises, but alive) and with enough free time on their hands and sufficient sense of humor, good will, and gratitude toward the Great and Powerful Doctor Lawson to want to
give
him this sign commemorating their ordeal with him.

Not only that, but Lawson himself comes more into focus. He has decided to
display
this sign, which means he must at least recognize the difficulty we've had getting in here as a common affliction among the visitors to his office. Either he thinks it's funny, which is a little annoying, or maybe he just enjoys the power in a warped sort of way, which if true would be very annoying. But one thing about him that I like (besides the nice chairs) is that he has some self-awareness, which is always good. Especially when you're the guy who's about to take my mother apart and put her back together again.

I see light at the end of our tunnel. Maybe someday we, too, will not be so mad at Doctor Lawson, and grateful enough to crackly-fart our way up here to present him with some funny, insightful memento of our own time with him, so other poor souls can sit their tender, cancerous fannies in his comfy leather chairs (for two hours) and contemplate the meaning of
our
gift after fantasizing about various ways of getting him offed.

It may be hard to spot, but there's a recurring theme here I don't feel like admitting to, but I guess I should. I may have this leetle bitty slight tendency to mistrust doctors, and it may be the teensiest bit unfair sometimes. Just sometimes. Because most of the time all doctors are either stupid or out to get you.