Michael Solomon - One-Way Street

The first thing I see when I come-to after surgery is the Indian Beauty, again, leaning over my face as I am being wheeled into the recovery area, and saying to me “the operation went extremely well.” She is not a ghost after all, but thankfully, for the first time in my life since I turned thirteen, I am so overcome with the euphoria of survival and the after-effects of anesthesia that I do not try to put the moves on her. I just smile politely.

But surgery is over! And Doctor Rusch – the Michael Jordan of thoracic surgery – has pulled it off with the thoracoscopy! I can’t see my small incisions, but for once my morbid curiosity doesn’t give a damn.

I learn that my tumor was on the bottom part of the upper lobe of my lung, so I got what’s called a “wedge” resection, about an inch and a half by an inch and a half in size. My middle lobe is just missing a piece of its roof.

 A quick check of me reveals:

1. An epidural catheter pumping morphine through my spine

2. A catheter in my left hand hooked into some glucose solution and a recent supply of Toridol anti-inflammatory goop

3. Foley catheter hooked up to my bladder via my dick

4. A blood drainage tube hanging out of me, unseen, beneath the bandages covering my incisions but definitely connected to a tube in my lung

Treatment is a funny thing. It is constructed like an onion. The more layers you peel away from the expression “We can treat you” in order to understand what treatment really involves, the larger and more frighteningly it begins to loom. In the distance, treatment shines like a radiant beacon of hope. As it approaches, it is all warts and blemishes. Only when you’re finally ready to receive your therapy, be it chemo, or radiation, or surgery – only then do you truly understand what’s involved. It’s for this very reason that a good deal of my strategy is based upon not learning about anything that I may possibly avoid undergoing. If I need horror, I can go out and rent Schindler’s List. When Doctor Raphael first suggests that my treatment will involve surgery I know there’ll be some sort of cutting instrument involved. Then out of necessity I am briefed on a few more intricacies, such as the delights of having a chest tube for blood drainage post-op, and then further on I learn from the anesthesiologist that I’ll be having a spinal tap inserted for pain management, and then from a nurse I learn I’ll be rigged with a Foley catheter through which I can drain my bladder. They save these types of gruesome details for the days leading up to your operation, sometimes even the minutes leading up to your operation – when it’s already too late to turn back.

For instance, I know little about chemotherapy, and even less about radiation. Right now they sound to me like variations on surgery that can potentially rid a person of cancer, or at least fight it off for a while. In other words, good. This is because I’ve protected myself from knowing the details until I absolutely need to.

But I’ve obsessed about the chest tube. What will it feel like? Will it look totally freaky to have a rubber hose hanging out of me? Then when I awake from surgery and see that the chest tube is pretty much concealed by a pile of white bandages, I switch my obsessing to the Foley catheter. 

If ever there were a one-way street in the world, it is that narrow passageway which leads out…I repeat OUT…of a penis. Don’t even think about putting anything in there because not only does it make me cringe, in some mystical way it makes every man on the planet cringe. We men may be pig-headed and ignorant and even downright stupid, but even the most pig-headed, ignorant and stupidest of us knows not to let anything in through that hole. Need to probe our rear ends with, say, a piece of tropical fruit? Fine. Need us to swallow live ants for prize money? No problema. Need to jab a Q-tip in our ear? Done. But the minute you want to invade the space reserved for the expurgation of our pee and sperm, you are crossing the male equivalent of the Berlin Wall.

So what then, I wonder, is this tube doing sticking out of my dick? How will I ever walk, or even more difficult to answer, how am I supposed to think about ANYTHING ELSE??!! Glad they at least waited until I was unconscious before inserting such a horrific device, though the mere fact of this catheter’s insertion implies, ipso facto, that someday it is going to have to come back out of me. How does that work?

Once I’m up and walking around the ward, it occurs to me that more than ever before in my life, I’m being led around by my dick, something I’d foolishly hoped might end with adolescence. So much for high hopes. There’s a tiny bit of play in the apparatus, so I can partially avoid the weird burning sensation of tube on sensitive-as-hell skin if I can just walk without any sway in my hips. Like Frankenstein. 

Urinating comes about in reverse as well. I of course don’t pee into myself, but there seems to be a suction effect working from the outside in, so it feels like all I need to do is not hold back and the urine will show itself out and into the drainage bag tied to my IV pole. Would an instruction manual be asking too much?

I get my first taste of Gel Treat lemon-lime-gel-type dessert, made by KOZY SHACK. It’s Kosher for Passover too. Hey – I’m alive – I’ll eat anything. Incidentally, my back feels like someone left their sword in it.

I seem to sleep one hour at a time. Up at 2, 2:45, 4 something, and now 5:30. I dream I am in my office with my assistant Stephanie showing her how great my surgery went, dancing a few steps, and then suddenly I realize I’ve forgotten about my Pneumo-Evac drainage tube. There is blood on the floor, and the seal from the tube to the hose is damaged. I call the hospital to try to set up an appointment with Dr. Rusch. Then I gather up the bloody tube, go into the bathroom and begin washing it as well as some other weird apparatus resembling a sprinkler.

By now though, two guys semi-unknown to me – i.e. I think I recognize them but I don’t know for sure – have come to the office and they’re hassling Stephanie over some something that they’re selling. I tell them that this is not a good time; Christ my hands are full of bloody surgical tubing, but they insist on staying and talking. I get belligerent and tell them to fuck the fuck off (these guys obviously represent phone solicitors who Stephanie’s recently been too kind to and who I usually tell her to just hang up on, with no explanation.)

Back to reality. I’m about to call the nurse and ask for more morphine. I’m really sore right now, my bladder is full, but I don’t understand muscularly how to piss through my catheter.

My roommate, an elderly Asian man, had his last bowel movement yesterday. It was diarrhea, which sounds like an even funnier word when mispronounced by a speaker of Asian languages. He and I have not yet spoken – I glean these details from overhearing his interview with his nurse. One of the joys of a semi-private room. And incidentally, what’s semi about it? That it’s not a public arena? More on my roommate – he vomited this morning. Mostly water – not the scrambled eggs he ate. When it came out it was the color of water. Somebody get me out of here as fast as possible.

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Michael Solomon is the author of “NOW IT’S FUNNY: How I Survived Cancer, Divorce and Other Looming Disasters,” which was named a Critic’s Pick by Kirkus Reviews (April 15, 2012), as well as several feature-length screenplays, essays, and short stories. One of Michael’s most acclaimed movies as a filmmaker is Constantine’s Sword, a documentary feature film he produced about the history of anti-semitism in the church and the roots of religious violence, based on the book by National Book Award winning author James Carroll (www.constantinessword.com). Constantine’s Sword was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and was released theatrically in over 70 US cities including New York and Los Angeles. Michael also produced and photographed How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), an award-winning feature documentary about Melvin Van Peebles, which debuted theatrically at New York’s prestigious Film Forum, and later played on the Independent Film Channel (www.mvpmovie.com).