tempest? meet teapot.

There's a woman in one of the stalls in the bathroom at work, and she's reading a newspaper. I can tell because I can hear the rustling of newspaper as she turns the pages. This is, okay, weird, but I also have to add in the interests of full disclosure that she isn't doing anything but reading the newspaper. What I mean to say is, she isn't going about any "personal business," wink wink, cough cough.

At least, not audibly. Not, that is, for the space of the ten minutes I was there. (I was washing my hands. Shut up.)

So anyway, there you go. Woman in bathroom, reading newspaper.

At least, I think it's a woman. Honestly. I work with monkeys.

I voted yesterday before heading in to work, a good two hours after the polls had opened. I was voter number 43, which tells you that: 1) people in my district are apathetic voters; or 2) sane people vote after work. I probably should have done the 2nd, since voting early made me late for work. However, I'd made up my mind about my votes several days ago, and didn't like to be miserly with their distribution. There was the additional fact that my mood after work tends to be pessimistic to the extreme, which could very easily have swayed me to vote the opposite of what I'd intended. My post-work philosophy tends towards the George Carlin-ish: "If you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem."

As it turned out, at the end of the day, my district ended up voting the same way I did, which was comforting since my entire life consists of a ceaseless striving after the elusive Norm. On the other hand, the rest of the state didn't. I can look at the results map's breakdown and recall driving through some of those dissenting districts. Since I've seen some of the inhabitants of those tepid pools of genetic abnormalities, I'm comforted by the thought that, while I didn't go with the majority, the majority probably shouldn't be allowed to breed, either.

(Political commentary isn't really satisfying unless you get to throw some gratuitous pig feces. For the record though, I wasn't kidding about the people in these other counties. The ones I saw end up on stage in Jerry Springer shows.)

In all honesty, I'm not particularly upset by the results of the recall election; I predicted that this would happen back at the beginning. Governor Davis was not a popular man, and the general election notwithstanding, as many people were voting against Bill Simon--labelled tactfully as a "social conservative," which was the PC way of saying "bigot" for some people--as for Davis.

Governor Ar-- okay, so I'm having trouble getting that out without laughing. The new governor might do a good job. Who can say? He's got good advisors. He's middle-of-the-road. He's not entirely opposed to everything I believe in: education, choice, gun control, civil rights.

Anyway, there's nothing to be done now. The primal ooze has spoken. We'll see if he manages to do a good job. I didn't vote for him, but I'll root for him. Something has to start going right for California. Might as well be now as later.

Besides, this means he won't be able to make a new movie for years. Who says there's no upside?

Here's one of the things I enjoy about Kaiser Permanente, my HMO. Every so often I'll get a phone call or a notification reminding me of a doctor's appointment I never made. Kaiser takes its management of your health very seriously. If it feels that you need a doctor's appointment, it will give you a doctor's appointment; your input on when, where, or with whom is irrelevent to the process. They're like Basil Fawlty: everything in this best of all possible worlds would be just spiffy . . . if it weren't for the #%&@*! customers.

I personally find this attitude liberating. Of course, we've established before that I have a somewhat alternative perspective on service in general. There's something comforting to the feeling of being a cog in a large machine. The Japanese were born to be cogs. This is why they're so beloved by the Swiss.

The doctor's appointment I had on Monday was an exception to this rule in that I scheduled it my very own self. My plastic surgeon had informed that she'd referred me to ENT surgery, and warned me to expect their call. "It's just in case," she said cheerfully. "I'm hoping we'll get your lab work in on time."

. . . Which, as far as I knew on Monday, they hadn't. Except for a two-second call during the Cow Trip--"Just wanted to tell you that we haven't forgotten you. We haven't gotten your lab results back yet, but we'll call you when we do."--I hadn't heard a word from anybody. Usually when dealing with the medical world, this is a good thing. Doctors don't call to tell you that your tests are normal. What they do is call to tell you when your tests are abnormal, since this means you are due for more of their time. Doctors get paid $15 a minute. Telling you that something's wrong is in the nature of a long-term investment. If you can maintain the delusion that an efficient, meticulous medical operation is giving you the service of its best and brightest, this means that no news is good news.

At least, that's how it is in the US. In Britain, silence means that someone accidentally diagnosed you as dead, and nobody has noticed yet.

My appointment was with a hasty, harried otorhinolaryngologist--ENT guy for Latin speakers--who buzzed in, mispronounced my name, and shook my hand with the air of a man who knew all about germ transmission and didn't like any of it. It amused me. Having accomplished personal connection, he bounced back to the safety of his desk and instantly started nattering about subjects I knew nothing about.

He'd interrupted me in my Agatha Christie--I get some of my best reading done waiting for doctors--so I wasn't what you would call "attentive" when he started vomiting clinical professionalism. In point of fact, I was trying to identify the odd stain on the back of the book. That's one of the bonuses to buying secondhand books; inhuman diseases and irregular contaminants are part of the package. As a result, a lot of what he said was white noise, interspersed with actual words during my occasional flashes of lucidity.

". . . lymph nodes . . . buzz buzz buzz buzz . . . normal . . . buzz buzz buzz buzz . . . melanoma."

I jerked back into the real world. "What?"

"Normally we do some lymph node removal for melanoma," he repeated in a rapid monotone, "but for now I'm just going to check how your scar is healing and do a quick physical exam."

"Back up," I said. "Rewind. What melanoma?"

He flipped through my thin chart, forehead wrinkling. "The melanoma you have," he explained patiently. I knew that voice. I've used it many times on my coworkers. It was the You are a mental microbe but I am prohibited by law from shoving this stapler up your right nostril voice. "This is why Dr. X referred you to me."

"Who?" I blinked at him. It's possible he was even able to tell; my eyes had gotten somewhat wider during the exchange. Who the hell was Dr. X?

He paused. "Dr. X didn't call you?"

"Who's Dr. X? I have melanoma?"

"Hm." This was obviously not in the script. "Dr. X was supposed to call you," he said, fretfully.

I pitied him. It can't be easy walking in and accidentally giving someone news like this. He looked cross. I couldn't blame him. Shame on Dr. X, whoever he was. And, bizarrely, my arms and legs were getting numb. I pondered on this curious development while the ENT doctor continued gibbering away. I think he was trying to tell me something about the diagnosis.

I didn't hear him. There was this strange buzzing. And my ears were going numb, too. Odd. I twiddled them experimentally.

". . . a deeper excision," he finished, and began poking my lips with a tongue depresser. I opened my mouth obligingly. He started foraging for my tonsils.

"U-ah?"

"Mm."

"Unh."

"Wider," he ordered.

Same conversation I always have with my dentist.

He started chatting again with a scope in my ear, squinting through it suspiciously before shoving it up my nostrils, one at a time. He began mining for my brain. "Looks good," he mumbled.

"Narf," I said.

Then it was the latex gloved finger plowing into my mouth. "Don't bite," he said hastily, and I started to laugh, he sounded so belatedly horrified--

--and somewhere in the back of my mind a little woman yawned, and stretched, and said, "Mela . . . what? What's that, then?"

Once he'd established to his satisfaction that my cheek was still there and that my biting reflexes were mostly under control, he vaulted me out of my chair and hurried me out the door. "Buzz buzz buzz buzz," he said, not unkindly, and disappeared. And I drove home.

Except that halfway to the freeway, my inner child had managed to look up the word "melanoma."

These are the things that happen when you're confronted with the reality of cancer for the first time.

1. Your tongue starts tasting of ashes. And not clean, papery ashes, either. The heavy, greasy, acidic ashes you find in the little china vase and accidentally taste while visiting the mortuary.
   
2. Your heart starts beating very quickly. Hummingbirds everywhere are jealous. So, in a different way, is Courtney Love.
   
3. You start feeling nausea, and remember all the reasons why having lunch at that sleazy grill was a bad idea.
   
4. You feel lightheaded. The world gets that poorly maintained look of public schools and Honeypot urinals.
   
5. It occurs to you that you probably shouldn't be driving.
   
6. It occurs to everybody else on the road that you definitely shouldn't be driving.
   
7. You think of all the trivial things you should have gotten done before you knew you had cancer, and regret not having done them back when life wasn't so weird.
   
8. Except that thing with the toilet paper mushroom. You don't regret not having done the toilet paper mushroom thing.
   
9. You try and figure out who should know, who shouldn't be told yet, who can handle the news, who can't, whether to bother the fiance at work when it'll just ruin his day--
   
10. You fall madly in love with the man you thought you already loved.
    

It was the last one that was unexpected, that ended up bowling me over the edge. Abject terror, yeah, sure, I was expecting that . . . but it hurt, driving home with this massive flood of love sitting like a septic tank in my chest. I pounded on my chest with my fist, like a flatliner giving himself CPR, and sobbed my way past his workplace. I panicked about the wedding--would we have it? Was it fair to let him marry someone on the verge of IMMINENT DEATH? I wallowed in an image of me on my coffin at a peculiarly deserted funeral: my corpse was fat. I wailed, heartbroken at my deceased self's weight problem. My memory recalled that people who die of cancer tend to lose a lot of weight before the end. My imagination reduced my body to skeletal proportions. I wailed some more. I looked even worse, skinny. No wonder nobody wanted to come to my funeral.

It took the radio to distract me from my morbid crisis of shallowness. I switched on the radio after barely avoiding a collision with the entire right-hand lane, desperate for distraction, and was insensibly soothed by a news show about Israel's bombing of Syria. The announcer's voice hypnotized me into calmness; there was something vaguely consoling about world events. Same old, same old. She talked me the rest of the way to the apartment, where I unpacked myself, organized my cell phone and Kaiser card on the dining room table, and made a plan. To wit:

1. Find out what the hell was going on.
   

It was not a complicated plan.

On the other hand, I'd never tried to get information out of an HMO before. Remember what I said about being a cog in a machine? I take it back. Us bananas? We hate it.

I reached nobody helpful that night, not unreasonably. It was already 6. The Guy drove home in haste when I called him; I sounded like an asthmatic turkey on the phone, all gobblings and wheezings. He wrapped himself around me like a warm blanket. He's taller than I am, and his hugs have a way of blotting out the rest of the world, drowning my face in chest and arms and the smell of fresh laundry. I listened to his heartbeat for hours that night, and found it more comforting than the BBC. On a whim, I decided I wanted to watch a movie or two. He came with me to the small independent movie rental on the corner. From 9:00 pm to 12 midnight, I watched episodes of The Tick with Patrick Warburton--"A two-headed cobra of goodness slithering down the path of righteousness, leaving its venom deep in the hindquarters of evil!"--and forgot.

At 12:30 I turned off the light, and remembered. It was 3 AM before the Guy finally coaxed me to sleep, still aching with craven terror.

I drifted through the next morning feeling vaguely sick to my stomach, the taste of bile an enchanting footnote in the back of my mouth. I began calling the various departments--Dermatology, Plastic Surgery--at 10, and left messages for several people. Two hours later, the nurse for Dr. X called back to announce that the doctor was out of town, and couldn't get back to me before Friday. So sorry. Before I could summon up the intelligence to ask who the hell Dr. X was, the call was over . . . and I had no idea how to call Dr. X's office back. I still didn't even know what department he was in.

Besides, Friday? Four days of feeling like this? Fuck that.

My arms were numb. It was hard to breathe. At 12:30, hopeless, I called and left a message with my primary care physician. She had had nothing to do with the entire fiasco, but maybe she could at least tell me what the diagnosis had been. I could do something with a diagnosis. I had resources. I knew doctors. Doctors who were communicative. Doctors who knew how to use a telephone.

That was the worst part: not knowing. Not knowing anything. Not having anything except that one word--melanoma--with nothing, no adjective, no descriptor, no code to link to it.

At 4:45 I discovered that my cell phone's battery had fallen out. I cursed creatively at the top of my lungs and pushed it back in. It beeped an SOS: message waiting. My PCP's nurse had called at 2:30 to get more details on my message. I called her back and gave her details, a step-by-step account of how I had ended up here, starting from the initial referral to the dermatologist.

"I'll talk to the doctor," she promised. "She'll order your chart and try to get back to you tonight or tomorrow."

5:00 pm. I resigned myself to another sleepless night.

Ten minutes later my doctor called.

"It's called a desmoplastic melanoma," she announced, dispensing of the courtesies with a machine-gun "YuhriHiThisIsYourDoctor." "In fact, the lab isn't quite sure that you have it at all. Your tissue samples"--the face nipple--"showed signs of being a mole, but also showed signs of being a melanoma. They're going to err on the side of caution. It doesn't look serious. This kind of thing is usually local, and rarely metastasizes. They want to do a more thorough excision in order to remove any tissue they might have missed. That should take care of it. Hopefully you won't have a huge scar."

I might have yelped at her. I think I babbled. I'm hoping I said thank you. I have the impression I might have hung up in the middle of a sentence; I was feeling a little drunk.

I wish I could say that I had some epiphany during my brief brush with mortality. I would love to be able to say that I came out the other side with a deeper appreciation for life, an enthusiasm for living, more gratitude for what I already have, more compassion for the people for whom it's real. I don't know. It's early days yet. Too soon to tell.

For the record, though, I would've made a gorgeous corpse.