“Okay.” I kissed her and put her in a cab. As I stumbled away into the night, only then was it impressed upon me that, indeed, something was very, very wrong.
HAVING GIVEN a rasping, panting house concert in Ottawa, having delivered a half-assed pass and then not worried one bit when it was deflected, I drove back to Toronto the next day. I felt reasonably fine, although my hands kept seizing up, the muscles constricting, so I could keep only one on the steering wheel at a time, the other requiring stretching and bending. I was scheduled to go out to dinner with an old flame, and when she called me at home in the middle of the afternoon, I reiterated my intention of supping with her. Roseanne listened to me for a little less than a minute. “Paul,” she said, “stay right there. I’m coming to take you to the hospital.”
“All right.” I had already considered going to the hospital, you see. I packed a bag, including a night kit and a book. Then I added another book, because I entertained, very vaguely, the idea that I wouldn’t be coming out for a long time.
The emergency triage nurse put a stethoscope to my back to listen to my breathing. She called over a nearby paramedic. “I can’t find the left lung,” the nurse said. The paramedic announced that she could hear it, albeit very faintly. “Don’t worry,” she told me, “it’s there.” If you want to be hustled over the hurdles in an emergency ward, it’s a good idea to have something very wrong with you. In no time I was sitting on a hospital bed, dressed in the undignified backless Johnny shirt.
I was wheeled down to X-Ray, where a nice young man rendered an image of my innards, blasting the rays through my back. “Just wait here,” he said, ducking through the door, “until I make sure I have it.” A second later he called, “Paul! What have you done?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . they’re going to want to keep you here, I think.”2 Back in my emergency cubicle, I waited. The woman in the cubicle next door wouldn’t lie on her bed, choosing to curl up on the floor and call out loudly for drugs. After some time, a young physician came in and reported that a lot of fluid had accumulated around my lungs. “We’ll try to get rid of some of it,” he said, “so you’ll be more comfortable. Then we’ll try to figure out why it’s there.”
“Okay.” I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t want to alarm people, I suppose, and at that moment, I couldn’t really think of anyone to alarm. My most recent romantic relationship had busted up. I had an ex-wife, one adult daughter (the other still a teen), friends I figured would come to my aid. But, hell, it was probably just pneumonia, exacerbated by my severe tulip allergy.
When a new doctor, Dr. Tran, came in, he informed me that there were many reasons I might have fluid around my lungs, the most common two being infection and cancer. “Infection is eight times more common than cancer,” he said. He left, then returned a short while later with a tray full of equipment, vials and litre bottles and lengths of tubing and assorted needles. He and an aide made me sit up on my wheelie hospital bed. They placed a table beside it so that I could drape my arms across it and lean forward. Dr. Tran tapped and thumped my back with his thick fingers, marked a spot with a pirate’s X for freezing. “Little sting like a bee,” he said as the needle carrying the anaesthetic pierced the skin. He didn’t say anything before he drove the two-inch draining needle into my back. He didn’t say, for example, “Now it will feel like a rabid wolverine ripping through your flesh to suck out the life-juice.” A warm sensation spread across my back as fluid o’er-spilled the puncture. Dr. Tran showed me a test tube full of light brown fluid. “It looks like this.” He angled the needle again and pushed it hard. Before long he had collected three litres of the stuff, which looked suspiciously like beer. English bitter, of which I have had my share, and for a second I thought that perhaps at some point, in my haste, I had dumped a few pints down the wrong hole.
As painful as the ordeal was, every second it went on I felt lighter, better. They left the bottles of fluid beside me for most of the evening, and I spent the night in the emergency ward. They asked if I wanted painkillers; although my back was sore, I felt right enough. They asked if I wanted something to help me sleep, but I thought I’d be able to manage it drug-free. I was exhausted, spent. I still couldn’t think of anyone to contact. I text-messaged a woman I’d known, briefly, the previous autumn. “I’m in the hospital.”
“Yikes! What’s wrong?”
“If I’m lucky,” I punched out with my thumbs, “it’s pneumonia.”
I WAS discharged from the hospital, having had, as I say, more than three litres of fluid removed from the cavity surrounding my left lung. What I’d experienced was, to give it an impressive scientific name, a “massive pleural effusion.” The high honcho doctor, head of Respirology, had come into my hospital room to tell me it was “obviously very serious,” but he said it would take them a few days to figure out why, exactly, the fluid had accumulated. So home I went, supplied with some killer antibiotics, and in a few days I was feeling pretty good. Indeed, when my friend Shaughnessy called, checking up on me, I said, “You know what, Shaughn, I’m half-inclined to believe in God. Because, face it, I was kind of at a low point. I mean, there’s no work . . .” (the Canadian television and movie industry, which is where I’d long made my pin money, was moribund, with nothing being produced) “. . . my career as a novelist isn’t going anywhere . . .” (The Ravine, my last book, had been long-listed for the Giller Prize, but pretty much ignored after that) “ . . . my personal life is a mess . . .” (which was, of course, more my fault than anybody else’s) “. . . so maybe this health scare is God’s way of saying, ‘Hey, fat-boy, you should appreciate what you’ve got.’”
And that was the attitude with which I, accompanied by Martin Worthy, my dear friend and a founding member of the musical group Porkbelly Futures, went to attend my consultation with Dr. Frazier on May 11, 2009.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.
“I feel terrific,” I said.
“Great, just great.” Dr. Frazier picked up a file. “Well, we’ve got some answers for you. It’s cancer. It’s lung cancer—”
(“Hold on, hold on!” I wanted to shout. “Didn’t you just hear me tell you I felt terrific?”)
“It’s the non-small cell type of cancer. You have what we call a ‘sessile’ tumour. It’s not what we’d call an operable cancer it’s a you’re a and think in terms of months andjkghghjgkkljhjkghjkghghjghjlshgjhkasjhkjashdjkn . . .”
SO—WHERE DO we go from here? Well, like I said, I had just finished a little memoir about my life in music. That word, “memoir,” suddenly acquired holy heft. The phrase “months to live” fires up all sorts of engines, most of them a little selfish (I’ve got to get laid a lot, I have to eat a forty-dollar Kobe beef hamburger), some of them a little more lofty. Namely, I wanted to write some of this down. So, I had this memoir, and my Publisher had asked for a rewrite, and he really liked the personal stuff, hmmm . . .
“I’ll need a couple of months with that second draft,” I told the Publisher. “I’m just going to add a new thematic concern.”
“Umm . . . sure.”
If I do my job well, this won’t be quite the motley pastiche you might imagine. I’ve become very interested in the process of songwriting. Writing songs is a way to interact with the world, to take it in as experience (employment, job dismissals, hopeful first dates, clumsy hand-jobs, bad whisky, rejected marriage proposals, accepted marriage proposals, bad love, true love, long road trips, and pronouncements of fatal disease) and spit it out in three- to four-minute units of airborne beauty and grace. And at this point in my life—way closer to the end than I thought I’d be at the age of fifty-six—music has acquired more importance than it ever had.
When I was a small child, my favourite recording was something called “The Cigar Box Banjo.” I summarized the story in The Ravine, but assuming you haven’t