2009 - The brotherhood of the maimed (English)

The Brotherhood of the Maimed
Elisa Steinberg (Jan 09) (English edited by G.Diaz and Jan Huttner)

My right eye is still swollen, but not too blue. I have a big ball of gauze packing underneath, inside of which, just in case, there is a frog whose stomach has been opened in cross shape by a Maya shaman, under a full moon night. Otherwise, I had to trust science, and I'm not so stupid.
Soon I’ll be able to remove the frog, and start caring for the wound. Manuel just went to buy Vaseline (yep, I also thought it was a bad sexual joke, but it’s not), cuz that’s what I have to use so that nothing will stick to the butterfly stitches.

In 5 days, the stitches will be removed and I’ll see whether I look like Frankenstein or Scarface. Either, or.

But after my last round in the torture chamber, they said the last slice they removed was clean, so no more cancer.

The doctors, with their sharp little knives, remove the affected area little by little, as if they are slicing cold cuts one slice at a time. But they stop after each slice, so the new sample can be dyed, frozen, and checked under a microscope in the Pathology Department. It takes about an hour before the surgeon gets the results, and if they see anything “funny” in Pathology, then the surgeon calls you in to remove yet another slice.

Before they send you to the waiting room, though, they cauterize the wound, which gives off a lovely roasted pig smell. But it stops being lovely when you realize that the smell is coming from your own burnt flesh. Then they apply more gauze packing, and they send you into a little room filled with other patients to wait for the verdict. This system allows the surgeon to treat 3 to 4 people per session (one at a time, of course, but in rotation) while the rest wait for results.

Once inside the waiting room, we were 8 souls - the 4 maimed, plus 4 mandatory companions- trying to act as if nothing bad was going on. They shoved us into a tiny room with 7 chairs and we played musical chairs. (The room is actually a Janitor’s closet. The architect didn’t see the need for a special area for transients.) The one who loses each round is the one going back into the surgical suite for more slicing.

I was the last one in. They had overbooked us by mistake, but the surgeon is a friend, and I told him I would cut his balls off if he made me reschedule for another day.

I looked inside the room and saw three people with huge balls of gauze stuck to different parts of their faces. It was an eerie sight. Once Manuel and I arrived, we were one Ear, one Temple, one Nose, and one Cheek (me), plus our four family members (easy to identify because they weren’t wearing any gauze). And all of us were white, which is really strange at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

We had an immediate human connection. I wouldn’t use the word “happy” exactly, but knowing that by the end of the day our cancers were going to be history allowed camaraderie to flourish with little effort. I felt like we were in the kind of Sociology experiment where a group of total strangers bonds together in order to fight a common enemy. And one more thing: we all had solid health insurance. Aha! You are treated very nicely when you come fully insured!

The surgeon came into the room every once in a while to convince us everything was going to be all right. Nice guy. I had sent an e-mail to Gastón, telling him I was happy I was able to get this particular doctor, because a) he’s an old friend, b) he had removed some of Flora’s moles over 15 years ago, and c) ‘he has good “bed manners.” Gastón cracked up laughing; he basically told me I was an idiot unable to learn proper English. He’s right. I knew I had written something that sounded wrong even to me, but couldn’t figure out what it was. Now I know. It’s ‘good bedside manners’. So sue me.

But Flora was too worried to bother with vocabulary lessons. “Who? Dr. S? But he was already old 15 years ago when he did my surgery!” Well, not true. The doctor is about our age, but I guess Manuel and I were also amazingly old 15 years ago.

My doctor is Persian. (He doesn’t say “Iranian,” he says “Persian.” So be it. And he speaks Farsi. He has a Peruvian girlfriend, and we all we used to go out for dinner together.) He came into the little room and said, pointing to Manuel: “And this is Dr. Díaz, a pioneer in the USA on leukemia research.” There was a little pause, and I felt Manuel and I had both been forgiven for our lousy “Mexican” accents. Now we were “white” too.

We each took turns sharing something about ourselves, and we found out we were all nicely educated folks. The she-Nose sitting next to me, said in a low voice: “Well, are we surrounded by geniuses?” “Oh, big whoop! Fuck ‘em,” I said, with my usual tender tongue. “You’re right,” said the Nose. We all knew that what brought us together was cancer, and I started to feel all these people were actually three dimensional.

The Ear was an 88 year old retired doctor, with a weird sense of humor. He had seen it all, and was pretty philosophical about this new “episode.” His helper was his engineer son, whose hobby is flying remote control airplanes, as well as real Cessnas. The Ear was the first one to get a clean bill of health after 4 hours, and therefore was free to go after being properly sewn. But he has to come back soon, cuz there were two more pieces of something floating somewhere else on his face, and they will have to go. We applauded when he was allowed to leave. Hugs and kisses galore—carefully avoiding his bandaged ear.

The Temple was a slightly younger man (I mean, less than 60, let’s not get too excited)—an engineer with an Asian wife. (She never told us what she did.) He proudly showed us his right ear, so elegantly put together a while back in such a nice shape, he said, that he wanted a cancer on his other ear too, so it could be redone and look as pretty as the fabricated one. (Some gallows humor is encouraged in this situation). But his bad luck got him a piece of crap on his left temple, and of course the gauze packing was there. The Temple and his wife told us they liked to hike and climb mountains during the winter. Crazy! He was the second one to leave, totally cured, for now.

The Nose was a woman (a lawyer), and I immediate took a liking to her, although I’m not sure why. She had started with a tiny little red pimple, but she was called in 4times to remove more bits and pieces, deeper and deeper.

Finally they told me I could go in for my finishing stitches cuz my last slice was clean, but they told her she needed plastic surgery because half of her nose was now gone. The plastic surgeon was waiting for her; they wanted to do everything right there and then. (Remember? Did I mention we all had good insurance?)

In the meantime, Manuel and the Nose’s husband, a previously shy financial economist, were chatting more than I thought either of them could ever chat. The Nose’s husband works at UIC and IIT, and he said Gastón’s time in Uruguay will earn him a lot of points when he applies to graduate school (if he ever does), and that knowing a second language, especially Spanish, will earn him even more points. He said they really take strange stuff into account when reviewing student applications, and Gastón could come to talk to him about it if he wanted to. I wondered how Gastón would introduce himself. “Hi, I’m the son of The Cheek who was sitting next to The Nose at the…” Nope, it doesn’t sound quite polite enough.

And that was that. The four of us, “The Brotherhood of the Maimed” (as Manuel decided to call us) we are cancer-free, and already cursing the stitches on our faces as if that were really important.