Percentages

When my doctor calls to give me the results of my blood test, what she has to tell me is no surprise. It could not have been negative, really; that would make things easier, which would be ridiculous, because things, it seems, are never easier.

I want the details, the ugly things that no one will talk about. It isn't enough to know that 12 people out of 60 ended up dead; I want to know how. I want to know how long it took, how much it hurt, how much of themselves they lost before it all finally slipped away. I want to know what happened to the 48 people who didn't die, but were left with less than what they started with -- and I want to know how long it took to lose, and what they were left with in the end (and how much it hurt). These are the things nobody is talking about; they are impossible to find.

There's a man who works at the produce stand where I buy all of my fruits and vegetables each weekend -- or, at least, there was. He was older than I thought he was, his voice heavy with decades of cigarettes. He was crass, and rude, and inappropriate, and he hugged me sincerely every time I saw him, and called me sweetheart, honey (but always remembered my name). It had been awhile -- two months, perhaps -- since I last saw him (but I am not down there at the same time all the time, and he doesn't always work the days I am), but, last weekend, while talking to one of the other guys who works there, while he was picking out plums for me, and putting them gently in a paper bag, I asked where this gruff old man was, why I never saw him around on weekends anymore. It was a shock to hear he'd died. We talked about him, for awhile, and I said that he had been such a sweetheart, and he laughed -- He was an asshole! And we both laughed, and I admitted that perhaps one had to be a younger woman who was terribly fond, as a rule, of curmudgeonly old men -- that maybe that is what it took to find him sweet. After all, I said, why do you think I like you? He gave a little yell -- God, yes. And he was just like me, wasn't he...but times a hundred! He gives me a handful of the sweetest grapes I've ever tasted, and a kiss on the cheek, and I walk away half-smiling, and half sad in a formless kind of way. People disappear, and it's nothing at all.

You aren't dead, but that hardly seems to matter; it feels, at times (or often, or always) like you have died (and perhaps that's how it seems to you, as well, but you give next to nothing away, so anything I might imagine would be merely speculation, nothing solid).

I ask her what this means, and -- of course -- she has to tell me that nobody is really sure enough to come to any kind of consensus. (How comforting, to have an illness where everyone seems to be playing one giant guessing game of Wait & See.) We just have to continue to pay attention (to pay more attention); we can try to space out my infusions by an extra week, or even two, to try to lower risks. Really, the odds don't matter -- you can come down on the good side of them or not, regardless. And of course, that's true, and my mind has never worked in numbers anyway -- but that doesn't matter, and right now I want the numbers, the percentages; I want to know the odds and hold them in my hands. Because it's hard to just close your eyes and believe in simply falling on the right side of luck. (Though if I truly believed in odds, it wouldn't matter anyway -- I shouldn't be sick in the first place, it shouldn't have happened when it did, the drugs that didn't work should not have failed to work, the ones that made me ill should not have done; I'm already in the minority group of more than one minority group, so why would I ever naturally jump to any conclusion that places me in a majority?) And things have gone too well; these drugs have worked too well. So of course what I am waiting for is everything to crumble down around me. Because that is what things do (and people, and everything eventually) -- crumble, disappear (and it happens whether you bother to prepare for it or not).