End Games
Thinking about how to play out life's final acts can be calming, even reassuring.
When you're lying on your back in the recovery room for eight hours after surgery for thyroid cancer, listening to the sound of your own wheezing and feeling as if you're going to drown in fluids of your own manufacture, you have a lot of time to think. And not once during the ordeal did the Red Sox cross my mind.
No, when you're staring at a clock on the recovery-room wall and right down the barrel at your own mortality, it puts the lie to the canard that "Baseball is life."
Life, it turns out, can be about news that turns a fit, healthy 49-year-old on Tuesday into a cancer patient on Wednesday. Life, it turns out, can be about complications that turn a routine three-hour thyroidectomy into a six-hour surgery and another, a few hours later, to stop the bleeding. Life, it turns out, really is like Forrest Gump's proverbial box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get.
Before this gets too dramatic, though, let's be clear. The thyroid cancer I have, discovered during a routine physical as a lump in the neck, is treatable. More than one doctor has said to me, "If you have to get a cancer in life, this is the one to get." And, body scans showed no spread of the cancer, meaning the prognosis is excellent. So, I'm not writing from the edge of the abyss. But during those couple of days in the hospital, I sure thought a lot about what I'd be willing to put up with if I were staring over the edge.
When I die, I hope it's on my last good day. In 1997, I watched my father, a pediatrician, endure seven horrendous weeks of chemotherapy and radiation treatments after a diagnosis of lung cancer. Knowing what I know now, if I found myself in his shoes, I'd try to finish reading one last good book, tend the flower pots, take a final spin on my bike through Dover and Sherborn, say some goodbyes, and then find an understanding physician (there are some out there) to help me check out gently, peacefully, and gracefully. No heroics for me, thank you.
Coming to this conclusion during my hospitalization wasn't morbid or grotesque or even defeatist. It was calming, reassuring, and self-evident. Faced with a prognosis a lot worse than the one I drew, what would be the point of enduring the suffering? That by some miracle I might beat the odds? That at least I would go down fighting? That people would admire a valiant struggle?
I happen to love my life. But I have learned that, ready or not, bad news can come at any time. We plan for so many contingencies in life. By making wills and buying life insurance, we even plan, in part, for death. But do we really? How many of us have figured out how we want to play out life's final act? When the time comes, will we grasp in desperation at every last straw? Or will we accept that when it comes to life and death, there is only so much we can control?
Having cancer makes you very attuned to every little ache, pain, and tingle. You worry that any one of them could be the knock of the Grim Reaper or, as I recently learned, something a little more prosaic. While taking my ease at Starbucks one day, a week after surgery, I felt a strange tingling sensation in my genitals. I immediately assumed it to be a post-surgical complication and was momentarily struck by the rather arresting thought that I was about to have an accident.
Now, I hate cellphones for many reasons, but I own one, and it's almost always set to vibrate rather than to ring. I rarely have my phone with me, but when I do, it's in my pocket. So, I was enormously relieved, in the best sense of the word, when I realized that the tingling sensation in my jockeys wasn't death knocking at my door or an accident waiting to happen, but my wife calling. She was just checking in to see how I was doing. Talk about reaching out and touching somebody.
