A Season in Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’d guess he was emotionally immature. Utterly self-involved, and as innocent about this as a child, he had the boyish brightness of a kid in the back of the classroom waving his arm, hoping to be called on so he can recite the lesson faster and more accurately than anybody else. He still saw life as a matter of winning and losing, and he’d probably never failed at anything in his life. Knowledgeable medically and (I am sure) well-intentioned, he could not extend himself outside himself, and so could not connect with patients. He was most likable when he was accompanied by a nurse. At his best working with warm, giving women, he relaxed with them, and they liked him. The nurses’ affection suggested to me that he was a good sort (nurses absolutely know whether doctors are medically good and whether they are decent human beings). Their ease with him humanized him to patients, while the nurses gave them human comfort.
    He had a difficult job: we were strangers, and he had to tell me I was going to be dead in a year. His solution to this challenge was to speak in an expressionless voice with an expressionless face. He told me I had terminal cancer, that there was no hope for cure or remission, that I was not to think of that. What they could do for me was—they hoped—to shrink the cancer and keep me comfortable. I had a year; for six months of it, they would give me chemotherapy and radiation if my kidney function allowed it and if I could tolerate the side effects, which could include nausea, hearing loss, loss of sensation in fingers and toes, and extreme fatigue, among other things. If I wondered why I should have treatment when my chances were so bad, there was always a small percentage who did well, and it was important that I think I’d be among them.
    What was he saying? Hope, but not too much? Hope, but don’t expect a cure? What was I to hope for, then? He emphasized that mental attitude was crucial to anything they did. I spoke up, assuring him that I had strong powers of concentration and that I wanted to hope…. But he wasn’t listening; he was talking over me. There was no hope for a cure, he said, but they were not trying just to keep me alive in the hospital; they wanted more for me. I couldn’t understand what more they could be aiming for, if cure was impossible. I said my swallowing had become easier over the last few days and that I attributed it to my visualization and the coven ceremonies. I also was taking a series of herbal cures and vitamins suggested by friends.
    Keep on visualizing, he said, but stop taking herbal medicines and teas and confusing vitamins. Eagle feathers? he wondered vaguely…. Chemotherapy would start at the beginning of August. Then he was gone, without a goodbye or a handshake.
    I heard what the man said. I understood it. I cried uncontrollably for a long time, with Barbara stroking my back and murmuring sadly, my children hovering silently in the next room, where they had gone while he examined me. It took me a long time to calm down. Eventually, I suggested we look for someplace to have lunch; I was not hungry, but surely they were. We found an Ottomanelli’s, and they ate as I stared at the pizza I had ordered. We talked, searching for cheer, as people will.
    I don’t recall the conversation. But I know that by the time we left the restaurant, I had silently summoned up the conclusions of the medical articles on esophageal cancer that I had read and twisted them to my purposes. One in five people treated with extreme measures survive nonmetastasized esophageal cancer for five years. I decided that the figures applied to me too (despite my metastases): Sloan-Kettering used the extreme measures required. Although none of the oncologists I had met had offered me real hope and most were negative about my chances, I decided I had one chance out of five. I simply made it up.
    By the time I got home that afternoon, I had utterly obliterated the word “terminal” from my