My urine sample was filled with blood that Thursday at the doctor’s office. It was the third straight day. I’d had surgery the week before when they removed a tumor from my bladder.
“Benign or malignant?” I asked weakly.
“We’ll know by Tuesday. And Marc, don’t worry if there’s blood in your urine the next few days because that happens occasionally.”
Well, Tuesday came, there was still blood, and I was worried.
After the procedure, I had been dealing with that whole mortality issue. That Thursday, I was 23 days from my 23rd birthday. My biggest questions had been 1) Why am I still single? and 2) What am I going to do for the rest of my life? Weighty issues, admittedly, but nothing compared to: How much longer am I going to be alive?
My parents assured me that everything would be fine. I had considered that, before finding out about the tumor. Trying my best to maintain a positive attitude, something nagged at me. Call it intuition, a sixth sense, whatever. It was whispering “Maybe it was malignant.”
Intuition is like a lit match in the corner of a huge, pitch-black room: It may be small and insignificant, but you sure as hell know it’s there, especially when the fire starts.
Sitting on the crisp, white paper spread across the examining table, I wondered how I would react to the news if it was bad. Even though there was a small child inside me who felt like he had lost his parents somewhere at Ala Moana Shopping Center, I put up the façade of being in control of the situation. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.
The doctor came in.
He told me I’d have to go back to the hospital, since the blood was probably caused by a scab breaking apart in my bladder from the first surgery. Then he handed me a piece of paper. “Here are the results of the biopsy,” he said. “The tumor was like a tree branch we cut off. It didn’t affect anything else, but it could come back.”
“So was it benign?” I asked.
“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “It was cancerous.”
That scared child may have started throwing a full-blown temper tantrum, but I just nodded my head and asked if I would have to undergo any sort of treatments.
“No, You’ll just have to be checked every three to six months for the next few years to make sure everything is OK. We don’t want it to come back.”
It’s been over a year and a half since then and, as far as I know, it hasn’t returned. Initially, I had mixed feelings about what happened. I was relieved because the tumor was gone and it didn’t affect anything else; but even though I was told people with the same type of tumor have lived a long time without it resurfacing, the feeling of gloom lurked, since something inside of me was working against me. I still think about it daily, going to the bathroom serving as a constant reminder I can’t escape.
People in my generation are less likely than children or teenagers to consider themselves immortal, but death still seems too far off to contemplate. Some of us get wake-up calls earlier than expected, but we hit the snooze button. I’ve always wanted to follow the famous message from “The Dead Poets Society” of carpe diem (“seize the day”), but never did, feeling I had no motivation. A year and a half ago, that changed.