How I'm Doing

When I was 19, my dad had a fever that wouldn’t break, so he went to the doctor, and six weeks later, he was dead. A bratty little habit that I picked up as a result was a complete and total distrust of parental figures. All grownups ever did was stress me out and condescend me and make sure I understood how little I actually understood. And you would think, with how high-strung they always were, that they’d be able to stop the world from ending. It turned out that even after all the fuss they dared to make, they cried at funerals just like everyone else.

So in January, when my husband found a tumor the size of a tennis ball pressing into his back, intestines, kidney, and aorta, I cried for about twenty seconds and then stayed calm because I knew that tasks at hand were to 1. Get a doctor and 2. Not get annoyed by the hysteria coming from everyone else. I could tell that our family members were doubtful that at 30 and 32 we could do this, and I rolled my eyes like I had done since I was 19. My high school classmate who is an oncologist said calmly that he thought it was treatable, so I held onto that. He said it was a huge advantage that we lived in New York, which, if you didn’t know because I didn’t, is home to the best cancer hospital in the country, Memorial Sloan Kettering. Asad’s cousin posted his scans into a doctor Facebook group, and random physicians from all over the country chimed in like they were solving a riddle together. They said the same thing. Treatable. They all gave the name of the same doctor, who of course, worked at MSK. I went on Reddit and found survivors who were treated by the same guy, plus a superstar surgeon. (These guys are kind of celebrities in the subreddit). I squeezed my network for people who might know how to reach these doctors so we could get in faster. Exactly one week after we found the mass, we had our first meetings with both of them. “You’re very well connected,” our oncologist said when he came in. Three people, friends of friends of friends, had managed to email him directly. What a rush. We high fived.

The next five months were a blur. We did what the doctors said. Friends came over with food. We buzzed his head in our living room, and he looked even hotter than before. He lost his hair slowly, and he was in denial that his eyebrows and eyelashes were still there even though they really were not. I was convinced it was only cancer technically. It wasn’t really bad cancer like everyone else had. He was young and healthy, so he’d heal well. Chemo was hard on both of us in different ways, but I was convinced that life was hard for everyone, and we just had to get through it. We were lucky and had so much to be grateful for. We watched YouTube videos and movies and smiled and laughed. Even through cancer, we loved hanging out together. I hit the gym. I wrote. I told people I was fine, and in the moment, I meant it. I told people we didn’t have to talk about cancer, and I meant it. I even tried to have a social life, which was mostly suburban in nature: a friend coming over and ordering takeout with me. On nights I knew he was stable, I’d make sure a friend was on call if he needed anything and then I’d come home by ten. People would look at me like a math problem, trying to figure out the most delicate way in. Why is everyone freaking out? I wondered. Why is everyone looking at me that way? Can’t they see it’s fine? Look how fine I am. Look how fine everything is. What does everyone want from us? Do they want us to be freaking out? Do they want me to sit on the phone and cry? My sister drove him to chemo one day when he was really starting to look different, and she cried when he got out of the car because he reminded her of our dad. I didn’t know what to say because I did not see this situation as anything remotely similar to our dad.

The thing is that I was crying a lot. But not about cancer. Never about cancer. I would always look for some other reason to assign to my impossible-to-explain mood. My career. My family. My self-esteem. Shit I saw online. When you’re in hell and you just can’t face it, the best way to make your big problems seem small is to compile enough small things you hate and focus on them. Because if you do a good enough job hating everything about your life, everything else just goes away.

After the chemo came the surgery to remove what was left. I can tell you that I was one hundred percent certain I was completely fine until the moment the surgery team finished sewing him back up. In an instant, I became insane. How was this our life? How did it happen? What the fuck was that? Like actually what the fuck was that? The only person in the world who could talk me down was still waking up from anesthesia. When I finally saw him, the whites of his eyes were swollen over the edges of his his irises and his body was puffy, but his smile was the same. I was in that hellish purgatory where I wanted to cry really badly, but it was all trapped in my throat. He recovered in the hospital for five days. I knew he’d be fine when he started getting snobby about the hospital coffee.

Some weeks later, the surgeon called. Pathology came back from surgery, and the removed tissue was 100% dead cancer cells. Thank god. We hugged. Then came summer. The Knicks. The World Cup. My birthday. We met our friend’s new baby. It was time to have fun. And trust me, I tried. But all of a sudden, it hit me that everything had actually just happened. That life could be like that and that there was nothing you could do about it. And that everything turned out alright this time, but that that wasn’t a guaranteed outcome. And in fact I knew it wasn’t a guaranteed outcome because my dad had died and my mom was in the deepest denial up until his last breath, both the denial and the breath I had witnessed with my own two eyes. Something really annoying is that you cannot use higher level intellect to stop your psyche from doing whatever wants. And what it wanted to do now was show me memories and memories and memories and memories until I cried and cried and cried and cried. Not just about the last six months. But about every moment from the past thirty years when I had ever been scared or heartbroken or betrayed. I believed something was wrong with me. I believed I would never be able to learn to live with the pain. I believed I was cursed. My mom would tell me that she had no idea what she would do if she were in my position at 30 years old.

I finally had the time to read Lena Dunham’s memoir. Her suffering was so vast and all-consuming, and still, it was so unintelligible to those around her. Her closest friends called her self-absorbed, called her a crybaby, accused her of exaggerating her misery. Most people think they’re kind enough to hold a friend in trouble, as if kindness has anything to do with it. Sometimes, suffering can be so intense and disgusting and ugly that most people cannot bear to stand near it. But Lena, who lived the dream and the nightmare and went to hell and made it out, gave me a glimpse on how I might too. As I turned the last pages, I sobbed from the bottom of my stomach.