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My nurse yesterday was named Sativa. Sativa is a species of cannabis, if you’re not up on what the kids are smoking these days, and not exactly a common name.
“My dad was a lowkey pothead,” Sativa said. “The good kind, though. He just smoked a little to relax at the end of the day.”
Sativa was the ringer nurse they brought in to bring me back to the light. The world had grown dim around me when the first nurse was taking blood, and I came close to passing out. By the time Sativa told me how she got named after a hallucenogenic plant, my color had come back, and my humor.
“With a name like Sativa I guess you don’t drink alcohol?”
“Alcohol is a group one carcinogen,” Sativa said. “It causes cancer everywhere.”
***
I didn’t pass out talking to Sativa, but I did pass out last week when I had to have preliminary bloodwork done. The nurse, who looked barely old enough to drink legally, said I had “Nice, juicy veins,” but my nice juicy vein “rolled” on her.
I had no idea what she meant. But she poked and prodded on my arm for a couple of minutes. I gritted my teeth, which is what I do in situations I don’t like. Head down. Jaw locked. Get through the damn thing.
But I could feel the needle in my arm, and since my first cancer surgery in 2023 I’ve developed a hatred of needles. I can feel them in my skin. I can taste the metal in my mouth.
So when she took the needle out for another shot at it, I gritted my teeth again. But suddenly I felt dizzy. I tried to tell the nurse I was getting dizzy and the last word came out like my mouth had been shot full of novocaine. I remember a brief sensation of falling, then darkness.
***
I don’t know how long I was out. Only a few seconds, I think. Less than a minute, for sure. I don’t remember going out, but when I was coming back, for a brief moment, I felt hungover. Like I was waking up after a night of heavy drinking, like I had passed out on the couch at 3 AM, like I’d been chasing vodka with cough syrup because all the vodka was gone. I’ve had a lot of experience with that in my life, but I quitdrinking when I was diagnosed with cancer. I quit smoking. I changed the way I ate. I lost weight.
But for a moment in the blackness I felt hungover, and in that split-second of disorientation between darkness and waking, I thought I actually was hungover. I thought I had gotten drunk again, that I was swimming up out of the darkness I used to inhabit when I drank.
“No,” my voice said in the dark recesses of my brain. “Oh no no no, please not that again.”
***
When I woke a blocky nurse was attending to me. She was middle-aged, and European, and she went about with that no-nonsense attitude older nurses have, her manner brisk and uncompromising, part scolding, as if I had passed out on purpose, and part love, as if she were so worried about me it made her snappy.
“Lie back,” she told me. “Drink this.”
I drank a cup of what looked like river water. It was some kind of juice. Prune, maybe.
She watched me for a few minutes, scowling, then rubbed my arm hard enough to hurt.
“You are fine,” she said in a thick German accent. “Strong.”
***
When Sativa was sure I wasn’t going to pass out yesterday, she finished taking my blood. She had to stick me again, but after the preliminary almost-passing out was over, it didn’t bother me.
Sativa told me, while my color was coming back, that what had happened was called Vasovagal syncope.
“You faint because your body overreacts to certain triggers, such as the sight of blood.”
“I don’t get dizzy at the sight of blood,” I said. “I didn’t even see any blood.”
“It can also be caused by extreme emotional distress,” she said. “Are you experiencing emotional distress?”
“I’m about to find out if I have cancer again,” I told her.
***
Jenn was crying yesterday morning before she left for work. I stood in the kitchen and wiped her eyes for her.
She was thinking about how six months after my first surgery we drove back to Kansas City for a follow up CT Scan. They wanted to make sure the cancer hadn’t spread, but it was a routine appointment. Just checking to make sure. Just dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts. We were singing and smiling all the way there, sure the scans would show nothing.
Instead, the doctor said they’d found a second tumor. Opposite kidney this time, same surgery. Jenn sat there stunned. I could tell she was struggling to hold it in. In the parking garage she bent her head over the wheel while I tried awkwardly to hug her.
I knew she was thinking about that second diagnosis when she was crying yesterday morning. She was thinking of what happens if there’s a third diagnosis. I know, because I’ve thought of nothing else for the last six months. I told my father after the first diagnosis that maybe this was the start of a long struggle, like how you read in the obituary that a person died after a 10 year battle with cancer. After multiple procedures, after radiation and chemo and surgery. After financing a second mortgage. After going bankrupt. After losing so much weight they seem a shadow of their former self. After bruised and bloated skin, after all the hair falls out, after they have become translucent with light.
Then, after it’s all over, we say they finally succumbed. They went home, we say, where their suffering is ended.
***
I never had cancer dreams. Not when the tumors were still inside me, not after the doctor cut them out.
I have lots of dreams about alcohol. They always happen this way: I am at a party and I accidentally pick up the wrong drink. There’s vodka in it, my ancient nemesis, but that single drink fires up the old synapses. That warm feeling hits my stomach, and I want another drink so badly I can taste it in my sleep.
In the dream I stand there holding the drink. My subconscious is screaming at me to put it down, but my arm keeps raising the glass.
“That’s cancer you’re drinking,” a voice says, and that’s when I wake up, just before I have to make the decision of whether or not I’m going to drink cancer.
***
“You’ll probably pass out a few more times,” Sativa told me. “But eventually it will get better.”
She told me some things to do: drink lots of water, practice breathing, lie down and lift my legs up.
She didn’t tell me what to do in case the cancer comes back, but she didn’t have to. An hour after almost passing out I was sitting in a little room—the same room I got the second diagnosis in—listening to the doctor say there was no sign of cancer. The CT scan was clear. No cancer in the kidneys, no cancer spreading to the lungs or any other vital organs.
Jenn and I both tried very hard not to cry in relief. Neither of us quite kept from it, but it was the good kind of cry, the kind that releases all the pent-up shit that’s been causing you to pass out, to wake up in the middle of the night thinking about alcohol and cancer and death, staring at the ceiling in the darkness and thinking of your own coming demise.
Sativa told me other things that seem pertinent—that internalizing trauma can cause you to pass out. That stress can. That fear of bodily injury can. That more men should seek therapy because of the harm they are doing to their insides.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’ve spent most of my life hurting myself. That I’ve done more harm to myself than anyone else ever could. That men internalize emotional distress because many of us have never been taught how to deal with it. That we know, deep down, we are flawed, always looking elsewhere for what we already own. Always chasing what’s right in front of us, always looking for something we can’t even define, always wanting more than the world will give us.
But sometimes the world gives us time to learn. We get a clean bill of health. We get a nurse who walks us back from the edge. We get a doctor who cuts the cancer out and we get a partner who drives us to our appointments while crying quietly in the car. We learn grace. We get better, some of us.
I suppose cancer is the ultimate bodily injury. The kind that keeps coming back, like a bum knee. Like a bad back, like a sore tooth, like a hip that flares up when the weather turns foul.
It is the worst kind of injury, except for all the little ways we wound ourselves.
What line are you still carrying?
When did you first recognize the ways you’d become disconnected from yourself?
Paul Crenshaw is the author of three essay collections: This One Will Hurt You, This We’ll Defend, and Melt With Me, on the Cold War culture of the 1980s. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Pushcart Prize. Follow him on Substack at https://substack.com/@paulcrenshaw
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My mom went through five years of cancer treatments, including having a kidney removed, but in the end it wasn’t cancer that killed her. She had an aneurysm that took her peacefully.
Brilliant piece. Thank you for writing and sharing your world with us. Really interesting.