dcnovice
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January 29, 2014
Hell in the Hallway
Dear Ones ---
Perhaps the second-speediest marriage proposal in presidential history took place on May 4, 1915, a warm spring evening in Washington. President Woodrow Wilson and a handful of guests were relaxing on the south portico after dinner. Most of them, heeding a presidential request from earlier in the day, discreetly excused themselves to walk through the grounds. That left the chief executive alone with Edith Bolling Galt—a vivacious, pretty widow he’d met two months before.
As the then Mrs. Galt wrote in her memoir, the President drew his chair closer, declared his love, and asked for her hand. She was stunned. “We talked for more than an hour,” she recounted, “and I told him if it had to be yes or no at once it would have to be no.”
That story’s been on my mind a lot lately, because I await my own “yes or no” from surgeon John Marks to the question that has consumed my last year: “Can I emerge from cancer treatment with my plumbing intact?” And that year, I just realized, began exactly 12 months ago, with my colonoscopy on January 29, 2013.
Marks’s original answer was a confident “yes,” hence all my treks to Philadelphia and the decision to have my surgery there. That, of course, was before E. coli crept into my ass and began wreaking havoc. Gauging the extent of that havoc was the agenda for my most recent journey north. On the 20th, as I slumbered under a general anesthetic, Dr. Marks probed my neither regions.
Unfortunately, I don’t know as much as I’d like about what he found. I was still half-comatose when he dropped by the recovery room, and he was fairly noncommittal. He asked when my next appointment was and mentioned that the infection might be “chronic.”
“For the rest of my life?!” I asked. He said no, but I don’t know what “chronic” means in my context.
My entourage wasn’t much more successful in worming answers out of the good doctor, so we’re all frustrated. With some perspective, I suspect Dr. Marks’s answer to the $64,000 (perhaps literally) question remains “I don’t know.” It may still be too soon to know exactly how much damage the bacteria have done.
That leaves me with mixed feelings. Naturally, I want the ordeal (which will ultimately include another nontrivial operation) to be over—now. My family, I think, wants that even more than I do. Then again, I think of Mrs. Galt (later, of course, to become Mrs. Wilson) and realize that hope lingers so long as I haven’t gotten that final, dreadful “No.”
Typing this, I find myself remembering the old, saccharine saying that God never closes one door without opening another. I’d always kind of cringed at that until I heard the rejoinder: “But it’s hell in the hallway.” It is.
It helps, though, in this hallway to know that your love and prayers are with me. Thank you.
Cheers,
DC
P.S. I know, I know: You’ve all been waiting for me to stop whining and tell you what the fastest presidential proposal was. That honor belongs to LBJ, who won Lady Bird’s hand on the first date.
_____________________________
No matter how cynical you become,
it's never enough to keep up.
JANE WAGNER, THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF
INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
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