Today: Another Bone Scan

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

10:45 a.m.

Joyce and I are sitting in a Starbucks at Legacy Village up near Cleveland. About an hour ago, I had my “nuclear shot,” an injection, the preliminary step in a nuclear bone scan. We’ll wait here until, oh, about noon, when we’ll head back to Seidman (a few miles away) for the scan, which takes about forty minutes.

I have these scans periodically. My oncologist is regularly checking carefully to see if my prostate cancer, which has metastasized into my bones, has been spreading—or finding a nice little spot to nestle down and reproduce. Its last “nice little spot” was in one of my vertebrae, a cancer-home that a course of radiation significantly disrupted last year.

But metastatic cancer is a patient foe: He/She will wait a bit, find a more favorable location, and move in. And dare us to do something about it.

Meanwhile, I sit here with nuclear material coursing through my veins, flooding me with glitter that the scanning machine will be able to detect. A scan, by the way, printed out, looks like, well, a picture of a skeleton. And if any bones of that skeleton feature any glowing spots, guess that that means?

To pass the time, we are reading. Joyce is nearly finished with Brock Clarke’s new novel, Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? (which I’ve already read—and loved), and I am typing this and will soon continue reading Ian McEwan’s new one, Machines Like Me, a novel about the arrival of robots in our world. I say “our world,” but the world McEwan writes of is sort of an alternative world—it’s like ours; it’s unlike ours—e.g., computer pioneer Alan Turing  is still alive, now an older, celebrated hero in England. (I can’t type Turing’s name without picturing Benedict Cumberbatch, who played him (so well) in The Imitation Game (2014).)

And then, as I said, about noon, we will drive back to Seidman, where I will lie on a table while a machine whirs over me (I will have to change positions a number of times so it can record different angles on my … skeleton). To help the time move more quickly I will whisper poems I’ve memorized, hoping, I guess, that the sounds of Dickinson and Shakespeare and Millay and Shelley and so many others will appease the cancer gods for just a little longer. (Won’t they want to hear more?)

I’m pretty calm right now—how could I not be with Joyce about four feet away from me? This cancer-journey of mine is about fifteen years old now, and she has sat with me, held my hand, calmed me, for all of it. So, really, isn’t gratitude sometimes just a pathetically inadequate word?