Eleven years ago, cancer and I performed a brief duet. The surgeon declared my tumor “minor and easily treatable, no chemo or radiation required.” It could be easily removed, with one six-hour procedure. Nevertheless, I responded to the diagnosis by turning into an asshole.
Post-surgery, I snapped at my nurses. One wasn’t speedy enough with the pain meds. One refused to close the door to my hospital bathroom in case I slipped. “I run marathons,” I muttered. “I’m not going to slip.” Another persisted in sympathetically squeezing my toes until I literally growled. I have no idea who these nurses were; I didn’t ask, and I didn’t care. Cancer scared the hell out of me. I had no patience for anyone healthy and trying to help.
Every month for a year, I had to return to my surgeon’s office for checkups. I spent the two-hour drive up to Portland, and then the 10-minute oral exam, trembling with terror. I was terrified that he’d find more misbehaving cells. I did attempt to smile at the receptionist each month, but the effect was more “rabid dog” than “grateful survivor.” I was not a pleasure to be around.
When the surgeon finally declared me all clear of cancer cells, everyone involved, I imagine, was glad to be rid of me.
I didn’t realize then that I’d ignored an opportunity in coming face-to-face with so many new people, even under horrific circumstances. I’m a journalist; interviewing folks is what I do. But I didn’t see how this skill might serve me as a patient. That changed when my mother—also a journalist—checked herself and her Stage 4 ovarian cancer into a hospice care home.
Initially, my mother’s cancer diagnosis also transformed her into a ball of resentment and rage. On deadline for magazine articles and a second novel—and dealing with some serious denial—she snarled at her oncologist, her wife, her poodles, and me. But half a year later, her doctors gave her two months to live, and she became a soulful ally to every medical professional and janitor who walked through the door of her hospice room.
“Honey! Did you see the picture of Angie’s labradoodle?” she might ask as I walked into her small white room to thumbtack another family photo to the otherwise bare walls. And her overworked orderly, grim and hunched a moment before, would straighten up and beam as she passed me her phone with a photo of a dog in a tutu. In hospice, she knew everyone’s pets. She knew their kids and grandkids. One course away from a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, she discussed the latest mental health research with her nurses.
“You’re alive until you’re not,” she told me when I worried that all the talking might tire her out. “What a wonderful opportunity I have to connect with people here.”
She reserved her deepest attention for the orderlies who came in to change her bedpan and her sheets. Here was a woman who couldn’t say the word fart when we were growing up. Now she mitigated the humiliation of letting someone else deal with her body’s waste by asking about their honeymoons and graduations and divorces. She listened to complaints about the family members of other patients who yelled and cursed at hospice care staff. “People treat medical professionals so poorly,” she told me. “I want to write a book about how to be kind in a crisis.”
She died before she could, but I absorbed the lesson—eventually. My own medical crisis had been all about my pain, my fear, my discomfort; even in witnessing hers, I had no desire to connect with anyone in my fog of grief.
But four years after my mother’s death, doctors abruptly discovered in me a mutant gene. Because my mom and grandmother had passed away from reproductive cancers, my primary care doctor suggested genetic testing. Turns out I possessed not the dreaded BRCA gene but another mutation responsible for all sorts of nasty diseases, including pancreatic cancer. I needed a gauntlet of tests: a skin check, a colonoscopy, and an MRI. This time, I resolved to be a different sort of patient, one who showed authentic interest in the people helping her.
My mother had trained herself over a lifetime—and trained me as well—to ask open-ended questions inspiring more than one-word answers: not “How’s your daughter’s new baby?” but “What’s it like to be a grandmother?” She taught me that everyone has a fascinating story—you simply need to ask the right questions, listen mindfully, and respond with curiosity.
Now, in the skin doctor’s office, I shed my shirt, bra, and jeans and asked the stone-faced doctor to tell me about the most interesting parts of her work. She warmed to the question. We talked about how people didn’t use to exercise past age 30, and how she now treated more and more aging athletes for melanoma. “They want to run in the sun until they’re 90,” she despaired. “Freaking sit down already!”
“Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever discovered melanoma?” I asked.
“Between someone’s buttocks,” she said. “Take off your underwear and spread ’em.”
My mother, the granddaughter of comic vaudevillians, recognized the power of humor to defuse tension in a room; she kept a plastic alligator dressed like the Dalai Lama on her hospice bed, along with my young daughter’s gift of a sloth puppet, the better to entertain staff. I recalled her nurses’ delight, years later, as my gastroenterologist introduced himself during a pre-MRI visit over Zoom. “How are you today?” he asked, his merry brown eyes assessing the straw in my hair.
“Seriously?” I said. “I’d be a lot better if I could find my missing chicken.”
The doctor blinked, stunned into silence, and then cracked up. “What’s her name?” he asked.
“Honey,” I told him. And then, instead of launching into my terror about the MRI, I asked, “What pets do you have?”
For five minutes, we debated the pros and cons of hen vs. puppy ownership. “Don’t eat or drink anything four hours before the MRI,” he said before he logged off. “I hope you find your chicken.”
The nurse the next day presented me with a pair of overly large fuchsia scrubs. I shuffled into the MRI waiting room and found three other women pinkly outfitted, plus one in blue scrubs. “Uh-oh,” I said, sitting down beside her, eyeing the out-of-place color. “What did you do?”
“I wondered the same thing!” she said, and everyone laughed, and then commenced chatting, a moment of respite from our faulty bodies.
“Use the restroom,” the MRI tech commanded. I returned with someone else’s locker key left behind on the sink. He held it up to the waiting-room women. “Anyone lose this? This lady just fished it out of the toilet.”
They howled, and the woman in the blue scrubs claimed her key. “Ah,” the tech quipped, “that explains everything.”
I hated leaving them as I went in for my scan. The tech led me to a chair and prepared to insert an IV. Tempted to do an info dump about my rogue gene, I asked instead, “So what do you do for fun when you’re not imaging someone’s pancreas?”
“Bass fishing from my kayak,” he told me. “Catch and release.”
We talked about our favorite rivers to paddle, and about a golden hummingbird he’d seen on a local lake. I barely noticed as the needle went into my hand.
“How are you feeling?” his assistant said before she slid me into the vast maw of the MRI machine.
I looked up at her. “I feel fine,” I said honestly. “How’s your day?”
She squeezed my toes. I didn’t even feel the urge to growl. She replied, “It’s just so good to see someone in here smiling.”
