GOOD CARE WITH CONSENT

Artist’s Date #36: Call all your friends and recover from something

On Saturday I found that I couldn't be alone with one big thing anymore. It happened quickly, this shift to a dangerous place, like a flash flood. I knew it was raining. I ignored the warning messages on my phone. I felt that if I got caught in the waves, I got caught in the waves—I was already out in the storm as it was. Then I was underwater. The rain outside was doing exactly the same thing, turning streets into sinks and rushing down the roads faster and faster from Friday morning to Sunday.

I have exactly two friends in San Francisco who don't find fault in me for being unprepared, one of whom I’d already asked for help before I got wet. She had given me guidance [do what you’d do if you were planning for Olive] and I hadn’t and she didn’t tell me when I asked for their help later that my window had closed. Instead she said, let me just put on my pajamas and I’ll be there in 20.

That was Celeste. She brought TWO kinds of pastries in a little white box. The first one was an apple pie that wasn’t a pie but a single serve pie in the shape of a slice. The other was a savory thing; ham and cheese inside a croissant but it tasted like it was all made of one flavor. I ate them both on the couch next to her, sometimes leaning into her shoulder and other times making fun of myself for being so dramatic.

Then Kevin came over like he used to come over when we were 12 and we lived on Long Island. He moved to SF recently and as soon as I saw him I thought: my best friend is back! He is a person who has no problem with conversation shifting this way and that. Every time he’s steady and balanced and can talk about whatever whenever you want. That’s what we did and ALSO he played a game of Harry Potter Labyrinth and kicked all our butts. First we ate chocolate and he told me about his biopsy because it turns out everyone’s had one by now.

But between the time when Celeste came over and Kevin came over I had to also call Nancy - just to be on the phone with me during the time in between. It was just twenty minutes and the call was for ten which was enough to tell her that I needed her help too.

You know what she said when I told her it was going to be four weeks of recovery for something I thought would be done in the span of just one? I love this for you: four weeks of rest. It’s an amount of time for self care that feels incompressible — impossibly long. How am I going to pay attention to myself and my body for a god damn whole month? I spend most of my day coming up with strategies to put off paying attention to it for one minute longer!

I know I’m talking around something here. I got the stupid biopsy. It came back benign. Everyone keeps telling me that I did the right thing to have gotten it: that it’s the adult thing to do — but I’m not so sure. Even the radiologist, who I’m sure had longer conversations with me than any other non-cancerous patient in history - said she would have done the same thing but I didn’t believe her. It’s ok, I had comforted her, you don’t have to keep going over the same thing with me. And besides, it’s already over.

I made the wrong decision, I said to Lucy on the phone, and she understood what I meant completely, but didn’t agree. How could you have made the wrong decision when it was in the interest of your own health and well being? It landed for me finally that what was happening was I had wanted the biopsy but I had not wanted to put together the support I needed to have it without drowning. I hadn’t wanted to admit that it scared me, that there might be physical symptoms after the procedure, that it might bring up feelings that I couldn’t untangle. I wanted it to be clean and perfect, like the way I wanted my body to be clean and perfect, before this whole thing had started a few years ago.

This morning I’m looking at the place where the needle went in and it’s all kinds of colors. The bruise, now four inches, keeps spreading like ink. I don’t want to try to make this thing beautiful. I couldn’t wait to get the tape off and see the deep hole but there isn’t one there. There’s just a very small 2 or 3 mm slit where the skin looks like there’s already a scar.

There were two narratives in the room where we discussed the decision and I was there with a fellow and a doctor and for us to have gotten to a place where we spoke the same language might have taken forever.

You have a cyst, which is what you feel, but that’s something different, the fellow had said.
Is the cyst that you saw in the sonogram what we’re sampling today? I asked.
You don’t have a cyst, said the radiologist when she came into the room.
Sorry, I misspoke, said the fellow.
I’m really not sure that I want this, I said.

No matter how many questions I asked I eventually got to the same place: a kind of robotic reiteration of the reasons that the system does X and then Y and then possibly Z.

I had already signed the papers on the white tulip table. I think I was hoping my willingness would be a way to get off the hook.

In the back of my mind I held another story about a woman who wrote about her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment citing a whole other kind of difficulty.