Preventive Care

For many years, in my life as in my writing, the main task has been to figure out what to cut and what to keep.

Short little bits of wisdom help me. I have a few handwritten and printed pieces of paper around my office with some notes to self on them.

DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT. (Almost always true.)

YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT THE HUMAN. (A reminder when I get too caught up in research groundhog tunnels when I’m writing about a person rather than a discrete object or specific event.)

PUSH AGAINST THE WALL LIKE IT’S A PERSON. (This is a somatic stress relief technique I learned from my shrink.)

I can see something in my home every single day – a pile of unfolded clothes, a dusty countertop, a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes – and not process it as a task meant to be completed. Then something comes up – the need to let a plumber in, for example – and I rush around completing all the undone chores that suddenly scream at me, “We are here! We are fucking embarrassing! Finish this or else they’ll all think you’re a fucking lunatic!”

I can see a consistent behavior in another person and allow it to piss me off a little bit at a time without mentioning it for weeks, months and even years. Then one day, various elements are exactly right for the behavior to either suddenly seem egregious or actually have a fucked-up impact on my life in such a way that I address it VERY clearly.

At other times, I do address it with the other person, over and over again, without seeing change. In this case I am still ultimately ignoring it, as with the basic home maintenance tasks. I am agreeing to live with the behavior.

I am saying, “You can keep disappointing me. It’s fine.”

This constitutes a false acceptance of some bullshit that genuinely messes with me. Real acceptance means I’ve decided that it’s worth dealing with on balance, and while it may still irritate me here and there, it doesn’t carry the power of wasted potential.

If I have truly accepted there seems to be no potential for growth or change in this area, some of the sting leaves the wound. It becomes a mosquito bite, not an oozing, infected sore.

And then there is the thing within me that I don’t address, the thing I step over without comment or rush past as if it were nothing. Like the layer of dust or the pile of laundry, it tends to grow.

At best, it expands very slowly, like the basal cell carcinoma a country pediatrician suspected she found on my back when I was a teenager. Nobody really thought it could be real – I was decades too young, not a 60-year-old man who spent a lot of time outside – but she encouraged my parents to have it checked further.

At the university hospital in the nearest big town with a train to the big city, an imaging technician photographed every inch of my body with what was, essentially, a very high-quality medical-grade Polaroid camera.

Strangely, surprisingly, the small-town pediatrician had been right.

It was removed in a simple outpatient procedure by a fatherly university hospital surgeon, with a panel of wide-eyed young interns and a sympathetic lady nurse in attendance. I wore a paper gown and nothing more, which certainly felt odd while I was in front of a pack of studious men in scrubs in their 20s.

Overall, it was a very respectful and positive experience, but I didn’t relish the exposure. Soon, tests confirmed it was a benign cancer, not a melanoma in friendly drag. They got all of it. I have a scar, and I’ve gotten plenty more since from biopsies in different spots. It was minor, in the small and large scheme of things. I am grateful for that.

But cancer is still cancer, even when it’s non-murderous. When left untreated for years, even a basal cell carcinoma can grow to eat away at nearby skin and muscle. Metastatis is incredibly rare, meaning that the damage is practically always local. In extreme cases, it is disfiguring. It almost certainly won’t kill you, but it can fuck you up.

Best not to panic. Best to just deal with it as it arises and not remain stuck in a hazy bog of inaction, sinking as you ruminate over what is and what isn’t and what could be.

I am forever finding, losing, and then finding again the middle path that allows me to hold all these truths about life and the body and all the rest without mentally excoriating someone else or myself.

I am forever figuring out what wants to be excised and what wants to be embraced.