The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. and Death. (28 page)

I opened my car door, stepped out, and began to run. Or rather, my feet began to run. I was on ice. I was stationary. I looked like Fred Flintstone, pre-ignition, feet windmilling in a
comical blur, slapping thump-a-thump against the ground, going nowhere.

And then, suddenly, I was going somewhere. I was flying. I blacked out for a moment, and when I awoke I was on my back on the ice. On one side of my body was the truck. On the other side of my body was my car, pulverized into something that looked like a large, smoking Raisinet. Witnesses later told me that the truck hit my car, then my car hit me, and rolled over my body, bouncing once on each side but missing me entirely. The front wheel of the truck was inches from my face. I had no significant injuries.

After the accident, after I realized I had defied death, everything changed. The nighttime sky shimmered with mystery and grandeur. A man could get lost in it, out there in the blackness, sitting cross-legged on the hood of his car, captivated and humbled, oblivious to the cold. A raw tomato, eaten like a McIntosh, was the finest meal a person could want. How could I have not noticed its pebbly, sweet-sour perfection before? A stranger's cigarette butt, hurled from a car window at night, became a thing of beauty, exploding on the road in a tiny, magnificent fire shower. You could taste water, if you tried. You could taste a woman without touching her, if you tried.

This sense of wonder lasted about a month. I tried to hang on to it, but it was no use. Everything returned to normal. You can't summon feelings of mortality. They visit you, stay as long as they wish, and tiptoe away.

Unless you are actually dying.

The first fatally ill person I knew well was Howard Simons, a journalist. Those of you who read the book
All the Presidents Men
will recognize Howard Simons as one of the principal architects of
The Washington Post'
s exposé of Watergate, the fearless managing editor whose wisdom and unswerving encouragement helped Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein topple a corrupt presidency. However, those who did not read the book but only saw the hit movie upon which it was supposedly based will instead remember Howard Simons as the cringing swine who looked like Martin Balsam and whose thickheaded skepticism
and cowardice almost single-handedly torpedoed the whole project.

Howard Simons was not a bitter man, but he was bitter about this movie misrepresentation, and he had hoped that someday someone would set the record straight in a book. I am sure Howard was envisioning a book with a title like
Principles and Practices in the Ethos of Latter-20th-Centiuy Journalism,
volume VI,
The Watergate Epoch,
as opposed to a book about peeing and pooping. But such is life. And death.

In 1989, Howard started suffering from heartburn and back pain. He went to the doctor, who told him it was advanced pancreatic cancer. In the pantheon of Things Doctors Can Tell You, “advanced pancreatic cancer” is very, very bad. If Things Doctors Can Tell You were, say, popular songs, “Howard, you have the constitution of an ox and should live happily into your hundreds” would be “Johnny B. Goode,” by Chuck Berry. And “Howard, I'm afraid you have advanced pancreatic cancer” would be “Muskrat Love,” by the Captain and Tennille, as rerecorded by the barking dogs.

In the weeks before his death, I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Howard. I had dreaded the visit. What do you say to a dying person?

In real life, Howard Simons sort of looked like Martin Balsam only in the sense that a goldfish sort of looks like a banana. Howard had ice-cube eyeglasses, a nose like an ocarina, and a head of hair resembling the cotton from an aspirin bottle recovered from a plane crash. It was infuriating to me that women invariably found Howard extremely attractive, as opposed to, say, me.

It might have had something to do with the fact that Howard was a lot smarter than, say, me. Howard was one of the smartest people on the planet. He was always right. Not only was he always right, he was always right in a way that was instantly evident to everyone, rendering all previous opinions worthless.

Once, when he was running a fellowship program for writers and editors, Howard brought me and several other big-shot young journalists to interview the man who was emerging as
front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president. It was Michael Dukakis. For an hour the governor of Massachusetts regarded us from beneath those flagrant eyebrows and held forth expertly on the great issues of the day. He was never at a loss for words. He never said “um.” He had a program for every problem. Once, he fielded a question from a Latino writer and answered in flawless Spanish. It was a masterly performance. We left plainly awed.

In the elevator on the way out, all the savvy young journalists babbled on about how charming and smart and impressive Dukakis had been. Howard listened until everyone else was finished and then said, “Won't win. No sense of humor.” Four months later, of course, Dukakis's campaign would collapse in ignominy when the American public discovered he was as dull as a butter knife that had been used to tunnel out of prison. Seeking someone with comparatively more fire and brio and naked animal excitement, the American public chose George Bush.

Howard Simons was only fifty-nine, but he always seemed to be the oldest and wisest person in a room, and this would be true even if the other people in the room were Nelson Mandela, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Confucius. An audience with Howard was always just a little bit intimidating. But now that he was dying, the stakes seemed apocalyptic.

There is a tendency to assume that when one is facing death one attains a higher degree of philosophical awareness. Howard Simons getting more philosophically aware would be a fairly scary and maybe even scientifically impossible proposition, like water getting more wet.

I asked Howard if he was angry, and he said, “You mean like this?”—and he looked to the heavens and cried, “Why me, and not Pol Pot?”

Then he smiled and said no, he was not angry.

So I sort of flumphered out what I wanted to know. I do not remember precisely what I said, but essentially I wanted him to show me the world from the unduplicatable perspective of one who is about to leave it, to answer what philosophers have been asking since lumbering prognathous-jawed hominids of the Pleistocene Era contemplated the vastness of the open seas. I
asked him to tell me how the imminence of death had altered his perspective on the meaning of life.

This is what he said:

“Mostly, you no longer worry about flossing.”

At that moment, to me, Howard Simons was the wisest man on earth.

Two years later, I went to the doctor for a routine cholesterol test. The doctor called the next day and said my cholesterol was fine but that there was something that showed up
1
and he wanted me to stop by the lab on my way to work to take an ultrasound sonogram of my liver.

I said sure, I would arrange for it the next day.

Do it today, he said.

And so I did. It was September 17, 1991, the day I was cured of hypochondria.

The medical procedure was not unfamiliar to me. I had seen it twice before, when my pregnant wife had ultrasound prior to amniocentesis. Amniocentesis is a procedure wherein, to find out if there is anything wrong with the fetus, doctors take an enormous needle and stab it into your belly. (Actually, doctors only made that mistake a few times before they got it right. Now they stab it into your
wife's
belly.)

So there I was, out on the examining table, reasonably calm for a paunchy middle-aged man lying naked in front of a cheerful, businesslike, attractive twenty-five-year-old medical technician who was applying oil to my crotch.

Next she started rolling a computer mouse on my belly, and going, “Mm, mm,” and approaching it from all these different directions. Coolly, casually, I asked what she was looking for, as though I really didn't care but just wanted to say something to be polite.

“Usually, looking for tumors,” she said.

She was squinting at a computer screen, which was visible to me, too, and there was my liver. Right in the center of it, taking
up maybe a quarter of the screen, was a huge dark elongated mass.

“Um, so what do you see?” I asked, still phenomenally cool.

“I am not permitted to diagnose,” she said evasively. It was evidently worse than I thought.

Miss, I said, please, please speak freely.

“I am not allowed to diagnose.”

Miss, just answer yes-or-no questions. Do you see that big black mass?

“Yes, I do.”

Do you know what that mass is?

“Yes, I do.”

If I were your father and you saw that big black mass there, would you be concerned?

“Yes, I would be—”

A maelstrom of horror, self-pity, and ironically, wretched gratitude for this young woman's honesty crashed through my mind. In that flash of perception, I saw my two children, grown, with families I would never know.

“—because my father has had his gallbladder removed, so it would be highly unusual and worrisome if he had grown another one.”

Ah.

Anyway, I did not have a tumor. What I had was hepatitis.

There are many types of hepatitis, but the three principal ones are identified by the letters
A, B,
and
C.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Hepatitis A has the advantage of being relatively mild, not much more worrisome than a cold, but it has the disadvantage that you get it by eating poop. Feces-contaminated food. I don't know about you, but I think this would bother me a great deal, even years after I recovered. I would never regard a morsel of hamburger quite the same way.
2
Hepatitis B has the disadvantage of sometimes turning you as yellow as a stool pigeon
but the advantage of typically being transmitted by a wild, carnal lifestyle characterized by indiscriminate sex, intravenous drug use, and/or generally behaving like a rutting jackal. Hepatitis C has the advantage of not being caused by eating poop and not usually turning you yellow. Unfortunately, it has the disadvantage of being the one for which there is no vaccine, no cure, and often no recovery. That's the one I have.

Don't feel bad for me. Hepatitis C is a cool disease. Lots of famous people have had it. Mickey Mantle, for example. King Farouk. Many of these people are currently dead. My point is that I had something serious, which I discovered to be a fantastic cure for my hypochondria.

Actually, it is a fantastic cure for a lot of things. What I learned, basically, is that—to put it as succinctly as possible—you no longer worry about flossing. A few weeks after I found out about my illness, the contractor who built the $16,000 deck in my backyard disappeared shortly before the job was done. Just … disappeared, right after my last check had cleared.
3
Prior to my discovering I had a serious disease, my reaction would have been somewhat immature. I would have begun calling this person at 4
A.M.,
egging his car, sticking a potato in the exhaust pipe, etc. But everything was different now. My view of life had totally changed. So I beat him to death with a baseball bat. I mean, what are they gonna do, execute me twice?

No, the fact is, I let it slide. Now, for those of you dying out there, I would like to warn you that “letting it slide” can become a bad habit. Not bothering to floss can become not bothering to brush one's teeth, and then not bothering to change one's clothes, then not bothering to pull down one's underpants before one goes to the bathroom, et cetera. It is kinder to others to behave as though you are not dying.

You will be reading more about hepatitis C in the years to come, because doctors agree it is very likely the next epidemic. It
is spread by contaminated blood and can stay in your body, undetected, for as long as thirty-five years. Many people who have it today contracted it in the 1960s and 1970s, during the heyday of casual intravenous drug use. I don't know for certain where I picked it up—you can never be sure—but I have a suspicion, based on the fact that I cannot recall precisely where I was, and precisely what I was doing, between December 1968 and June 1971. My clearest memory of that era is discovering in my refrigerator an egg so rancid it stank right through the shell. I was young and callow, but I was not a complete animal. Even at the age of nineteen, I knew how to handle a situation like that. I took the egg, climbed to the roof of my apartment building, and dropped it on a police officer.
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Anyway, when you learn you might be dying, you start performing certain mental gymnastics to make yourself feel better. You take refuge in
The World Almanac.
“Hey, in the year 1250, the average man lived to be thirty-eight. I am already
waay
ahead of the game!” You start reading the obituaries, and you take solace from anyone who died younger than you. You can't help it; a school bus crash somehow fills you with joy. The Germans have a hip term for this. It is
Schadenfreude,
and it means taking a subtle, guilty pleasure in the misfortune of others whom you have gassed to death.

It was during this time that I met the man who was to become my personal gastroenterologist, Louis Y. Korman. The Y stands for “Yves.” “Yves” does not fit Dr. Korman.
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“Yves” is as inappropriate for Dr. Korman as, say, “McGeorge” would be to Mr. Buttafuoco. Dr. Korman should be named Hopalong. He is a guy with orange hair who grew up in New York and talks like Jimmy Cagney doing an impersonation of Bugs Bunny.

Dr. Korman is a wonderful doctor, in the sense that he seems
to know what he is doing, and he has a terrific if somewhat morbid sense of humor. He was the man whose sensitivity I would need to get me through the trying times ahead. Unfortunately, Dr. Korman has the sensitivity of a corduroy condom. Plus, like all doctors, he sometimes dispenses critical information gingerly, as though too much of it could cause harm—as though the patient were a thirsty hummingbird and the doctor were standing there with a fire hose.