“How are you feeling?”
“Physically? Fine.” Brock slipped off the exam table and began buttoning his shirt. “A little tired sometimes, but otherwise okay.”
“Get more rest. I can write you off from work for a couple of weeks.” Dr. Hassan Kabul was already reaching into his lab coat for a prescription pad.
“No.” Work helped maintain his sanity when everything else was so out of his control. It gave him a focus other than how much he missed his wife.
“I don’t have to tell you there are support groups—”
“For husbands who have separated from their wives and now want them back?”
“No shit?” Hassan asked, smiling beneath his turban. His accent made his attempt to curse comical, but Brock hadn’t been able to convince him to stop trying. According to Hassan, he was a full-blooded American now, and his accent had been left behind with all the dark memories of the brutality in his homeland. “I told you, a wife’s place is next to her husband. What do your American wedding vows say? ‘In illness and in health’?”
“Something like that.”
“Erika would want to know what is going on. She would want to stand by you.”
Brock shrugged into his lab coat. “Not a word about this to Erika.” He knew doctor-patient privilege would make Hassan keep his secret, but he wanted the promise of a friend.
“Not a word from me.” Hassan crossed his legs, balancing himself on the tiny stool. “Any decision about what you’d like to do?”
How many options did he have? “You act like I have a choice.”
“There are choices.”
Brock leaned on the edge of the exam table, his long legs stretched out in front of him.
Hassan continued, “I think we should move beyond the observation phase.”
He froze, everything coming to an abrupt halt in his mind. “Surgery?”
“It was my recommendation from the beginning.” He leaned forward, an earnest expression on his face. “My friend, you have testicular cancer. We should have acted seven months ago. You wanted time to get your life in order. Your tumor makers have changed. We have to move on this now.”
“Surgery?” he asked again, not believing it had come to this.
“Radical orchiectomy followed by single-dose carboplatin adjuvant therapy.” Hassan scribbled something in Brock’s medical chart.
“Wait. You want to remove my testicle and give me radiation therapy?”
“It’s the recommended standard of care.”
His nightmare began in the shower eight months ago, after making love to Erika. He’d had a hard day, and she’d been so sweet, greeting him at the door naked except for a short silk robe. His emotions were on overdrive, so foreplay was short. He would often play with Erika’s body for hours, not making love to her until she begged, on the verge of implosion. This night was different. He was the one in a hurry. He wanted her more than he’d ever needed her before. He dominated her body, egotistically taking what he wanted. She bucked beneath him, encouraging his selfishness until he turned over his control, coming with an explosion he would never forget.
As an internal medicine doctor, Erika preached prevention to her patients. At home, they’d made a sexy game out of her monthly breast exam. But he was like so many other physicians, keyed in on his patients’ health but neglectful of his own. He’d left Erika to sleep after their vigorous lovemaking while he showered, and that’s when he’d discovered the small lump on the right side of his scrotum.
Hassan had been encouraging, assuring him it was probably epididymitis, an infection of one of the cords responsible for transporting sperm. He was treated with antibiotics and scheduled for a follow-up visit. The antibiotics didn’t work. The lump remained, and he began experiencing swelling and tenderness. Hassan scheduled an ultrasound of his testicles, which warranted more testing, and eventually a tumor was confirmed. The mass measured two centimeters, which should have placed him at stage II, but the cancer hadn’t spread to his lymph nodes, and Hassan labeled it a stage I seminoma—it was all a play on words, because the cancer had already grown enough to limit his treatment options.
Brock shook his head adamantly. “I can’t let you remove my testicle. I can’t do radiation.” He couldn’t deal with the side effects when he’d just decided to get Erika back. “I need a quick fix, doc.”
“Being a doctor, you know there aren’t any.”
“Remove my testicle?” He laughed sarcastically.
“This cancer has a greater than 95 percent cure rate, but we have to do something. We can’t just wait around hoping it will go away on its own.” Hassan began writing in his chart. “I’m ordering more tests today. We’ll get you scheduled for surgery next week.”
“I can’t—”
“Brock, you know what can happen.”
He did. His father had died from the same disease.
“Next week, Brock.”
“I need to do a couple of things first.”
Hassan stood and approached his friend. “I’m in this with you, but we can’t fool around anymore.”
He dropped his head in defeat. The moment he’d found the mass, he knew his life was changing for the worse. He fit the profile. An African-American man between the ages of 15 and 35, with a familial history of testicular cancer was at the top of the hit list. At 35, he’d thought he’d managed to escape. At 30, Erika was too young to watch her husband die.
“If the surgery and radiation don’t work?”
“Don’t get so far ahead.”
“Hassan, please.” He already knew the answer, but male cancers weren’t his specialty. Maybe there had been medical advances he wasn’t aware of.
“We try chemotherapy.”
“And then?”
“And then? We won’t worry about ‘and then’ because the surgery will remove the tumor and radiation will keep the cancer from spreading to the lymph nodes.”
“But if it doesn’t?”
Hassan sighed. “Surgery. Radiation therapy. Chemotherapy.”
Brock looked away, not wanting his friend to see his weakness. The muscles in his neck were so tight he couldn’t turn his head. The taste of bile lingered at the back of his throat. His mind raced uncontrollably and he was unable to filter out incoherent thoughts. The stench of industrial-strength disinfectants threatened to strangle him. He was scared. He was afraid of dying. He was afraid of losing Erika. But mostly, he was afraid of dying and leaving her alone.
“There’s something else to consider,” Hassan hedged.
“What?”
“You said you want to get back together with Erika.”
“I can’t do this to Erika. I can’t saddle her with an invalid.”
“Brock, my friend. You can go on to live a healthy, happy life.”
Not without Erika. And he couldn’t have Erika if he was half a man.
“You must tell Erika. Let her make her own decision. It is what you Americans do—let your women make their own decisions.”
He managed to smile at his friend’s peculiar personality. Hassan, a man who suffered prejudice every time he went near