When not knowing is best

I went to the VA early today. It wasn’t for anything serious, just to pick up some medicine I take to help fight fatigue.

The hospital is about fifteen miles from here. It’s a state-of-the-art hospital, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been an inpatient there four times in the last two years and I’ve been treated much better there than I’ve been treated in a lot of other places I’ve been in my life. The people who work there are great, and I mean the doctors and nurses and aides and everybody else. Even the guy who walks around with a tiny little broom and dustpan picking up pieces of paper and dust bunnies smiles when he says hello.

Everything looks new. Well, at least they have had all the machines they’ve needed, so far, to give me tests and take pictures and stick me and prod me and everything else they do in hospitals.

I have to say, though, I’m a pretty good patient. I don’t like pain, so I’ve been known to whimper and even groan when circumstances require it. But I don’t complain about the food even when its broth and Jell-O and I don’t demand a lot of service from nurses because I don’t like too many people bothering me under any circumstances.

I also don’t ask a lot of questions. I know I’m supposed to. I know I should get second opinions and all that and I’ve even done some of that in the past. But right now I just don’t want to be reminded of what’s going on inside my body. I don’t want to hear about it and don’t want to talk about it. I had colon cancer about eight years ago and had surgery and chemo and that worked out okay. But during that period, I talked about my bowels and bowel movements in public for the first time ever. I even said the words "bowel movement" to a woman. Now, I have a pretty rough vocabulary. You can’t live the way I have and not gain a certain fondness for some terms. But no man should be forced to say the words "bowel movement" to a woman under any circumstances, with or without cancer.

With this new cancer I don’t have to talk about my bowels but I do have to talk about other things I’d rather keep to myself. You’ll have to guess what those things are.

Sometimes people, strangers or passing acquaintances, ask me what kind of cancer I have and I tell them lung cancer. That’s as far as I’ll go. But they want to know more. Is it squamus or adenocarcinoma? Is it small-cell or non-small-cell? What stage? How many tumors? Where? What drugs am I taking? I don’t answer. I don’t respond because what they really want to know, especially strangers, is when I’m going to die. They’re like people who slow down to gawk at auto accidents not because they’re interested but because they’re hoping to see something ghastly. Or at least something they can talk about later. Or something that will make them feel better.

I don’t want to know enough to give them that kind of information about myself. I don’t want them looking at me like a smashed up Honda or Chevy. Hell, I don’t want anybody to know that much about me, not even myself.

I truly don’t want to know when I’m going to die. Fortunately, the real world isn’t like the movies. At least my real world. In the movies, some doctor is always able to say, almost to the minute, how long the patient is going to live. My doctor has never told me my prognosis except in the most general terms, in terms of averages. I know enough to know that when he starts talking in specifics – weeks or days – I’m not going to have too long to worry about it. That works for me.

That works for me because I never need to be reminded that I’m sick and I know that if I know just when I’ll die I’ll have more knowledge than I really want.