“Hey, do you want to go to the skateboard park this afternoon?” Jeff asked me over the phone.
I could not say no.
“Great. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” From my basement bedroom, I could hear Jeff’s Volkswagen Beetle pulling into my driveway. I grabbed my skateboard and walked quietly but quickly up the stairs, snuck out my back door, and into his car.
I closed my eyes, letting only the blood-colored light filtering through my eyelids reach my retina. I could feel the sunlight caressing my face, my neck, my arms.
You can’t feel fluorescent lights, I thought, recalling the two weeks of fluorescent light I had lived with in the hospital and the the few days of it in my basement bedroom since I had returned home.
Is it even real light?
I rolled the window down to let the breeze from the car’s velocity tickle my face and whip through my hair. I held out my arm, twisting and bending it as I played with the wind, one moment cupping the air, feeling it press against my hand, the next cutting through it like an airplane wing, remembering how I used to imagining I was flying when I did this as a child.
When we arrived at the park, I rolled up the window, a surprisingly exhausting task, slowly pulled myself out of the car. I looked around. No one else was there. I followed Jeff to the large bowl. Without hesitation, Jeff hopped onto his board and into the bowl.
I shouldn’t be here!
I could hear the hard rubber wheels of Jeff’s skateboard accelerating and decelerating as they rolled down and then up the steep cement walls.
I shouldn’t be here.! I just got out of the hospital!
Jeff’s wheels rolled fast, then slow, then fast again, skidding when he turned, rattling freely when he fell off the board.
I’m the tough kid here, I thought, ashamed it my hesitation. I’m the one that could never be tackled when we played football, not Jeff. What am I afraid of?
With my right hand I pressed my t-shirt along the scar on my lower abdomen, just above the waist of my shorts. I could feel the hard, pink scar still raised above my skin.
To hell with this!
I put my skateboard on the lip of the bowl, stepping on the tail with my left foot, while holding the front with my right hand. My right foot stayed planted on the ground. For a second I paused, but then I lifted my right foot up, placed it on the board and leaned forward to let gravity pull me into the bowl. No sooner had my front wheels touched the concrete than I was tumbling off my board, wrenching my stomach as I twisted, hitting the ground and rolling to the bottom.
My knees and arms scrapped along the cement, but I hardly noticed this. I tried to stand up, but my body did not move. My whole lower stomach was screaming at me. Recognizing my predicament, Jeff tossed his skateboard out of the bowl, ran over to me, tossed my skateboard out and knelt down by me.
“Hey, Brian, put your arm around my shoulder.”
I complied as best I could and Jeff helped me crawl out of the bowl along a much longer and shallower route than I had entered it with. Limping to the car like an old man, my back bent nearly parallel with the ground, I cursed my stupidity.
They told you not to fall for another four weeks, you idiot! I yelled at myself in my head.
I did not look at or speak with Jeff as we drove home. I kept my eyes closed and looked inside my stomach, picturing the red blood seeping through my torn sutures and dreading the return of peritonitis. When Jeff pulled into my driveway, I crept out of his car, leaving my skateboard, and limped down to my bed where I curled up into a fetal position. As I felt the fever starting I whimpered.
Although I had a fever for several days and my abdomen was sore enough that I couldn’t stand up straight, my fears of peritonitis flaring up again didn’t materialize.
By time I had my follow-up visit with Dr. Wilkinson there were no lingering affects from my fall, as, thankfully, I did not develop peritonitis. My stupidity did not seem to scar me.
When Dr. Wilkinson entered the exam room, he politely greeted us, asked how I was doing, listened to my generic reply, and got down to business examining my incision. With he finished, Dr. Wilkinson sat back in his chair and looked me in the eyes.
“Brian, I’m afraid the tumor was malignant.”
He kept talking but I stopped listening.
Malignant…Chemotherapy…Chemotherapy!
Memories of needle pricks, syringes full of sickening yellow drugs, sphignomonometers squeezed around my head, razor blades slicing my finger, clumps of hair falling out, tiredness, and nausea flooded my brain.
“Will I need chemotherapy?” I finally asked, unaware of whether he had already answered the question.
“I don’t think so. But I won’t be able to tell you for sure until we go in and get some more tissue to see if the tumor had spread any more.”
“Spread more?”
“The tumor had extended into the fatty tissue around your appendix, but not much. What we’re going to do is go back in and take out a couple of inches of your colon around where your appendix was. If that tissue is free of tumor then you won’t need chemotherapy. The tumor was a carcinoid tumor, a very slow growing kind of cancer. You should go home and not worry, just focus on recuperating from your surgery and the infection for the next couple of weeks.”
I tried not to worry, but I knew something had gone terribly wrong with my life. “Ifs” repeated like an automatic rifle in my head:
“If you live worthily, you will live to fulfill a mission.”
“If the tissue is free…”
“If you had brought him in 24 hours later…”
What if the tissue was not free of tumor?
What if I didn’t live worthily?