The Elephant in the Room

 

  

 I get the giggles.

 I used to think of it as cute.  It was one of those quirky things that made me-me.  At work, the giggles would check in at 4:30, after the midday snack or third cup of coffee.  I could never explain it, and sometimes at the most inopportune times-I’d find myself laughing and looking like one of the crazies I’d avoid on my way back to the train in Penn Station.

     Now at 44, and way past the adolescent laughter I used to find so charming, I am in the doctor’s office at NYU Hospital with my parents and brother.  Dad had recently undergone a nephrectomy, and now close to a month later, the oncologist was going to discuss the results with us. 

    We’ve gone from the waiting room, to the examination room, and now to his office.  We’ve progressed to the highest level room, and though it’s taken us an hour and a half- we’re still waiting.    I have done well at fighting off the chuckles.  Through the questions in the exam room, through my mother’s anecdotes to the nurses and anyone else who’d listen.  I even earned myself a few bonus points when the doctor mistakenly called my father’s behavior ‘erotic’ instead of erratic.  Not a smile, a smirk, or a grimace.  I’d thoroughly convinced myself I was now an adult. 

     Now as we sit and wait for him to come in with the reports on the biopsy, I take a look around.  A person’s office space says a lot about them.  I find it hard to distract myself from the oddity in the room; the doctor seems to have a collector’s eye for elephants.

      There are at least 100 of them, all different shapes and sizes.  Their trunks all point upward and are facing away from the window.  Elephant figurines in ivory, onyx, plastic, porcelain, gold, wood, marble, silver, painted enamel, and jade wander along the shelves within the library of medical books.  There’s a needlepoint throw pillow against his leather chair; water colors, oil on canvas, and a framed 500 piece elephant puzzle on the wall next to his diploma.    An elephant planter, (I think a chia pet) sits alongside the window sill.  At the edge of his desk is an unused elephant terracotta pottery ashtray, there’s even a coffee mug in grey-the handle-is an elephant trunk. 

     Just then, Dr. I Love Elephant walks in and apologizes for the wait.  He takes a seat behind the large polished desk.  His stethoscope hangs around the back of his neck.  It sits against him in a very trunk-like manner.  I close my eyes and try to concentrate on my breathing. 

   According to the doctor, when they went to examine the mass they removed from dad, the lab techs couldn’t identify the type of tumor it was.  They proceeded to ‘hand carry’ it to Sloane Kettering and from there it was sent to the Mid-west for further testing. 

   Like something was injected into the back of my neck, I feel convulsions coming on; the sillies are alive in my system.  I picture a team of doctors walking down the streets of Manhattan, each carrying a corner of a plastic bag containing dad’s tumor.  Handling it the way a mover might haul a sectional couch, pivoting in complete synchronicity through each turn, in each doorway, into every elevator.

   I shake my head, and now I’m back in the doctor’s office staring at the elephants behind him.    The oncologist is Middle Eastern; I find it amusing that he has all of these elephants.  If anything I could picture him on a camel in the desert versus an elephant in the rainforest.

   “So we’ve sent the sample to a lab in Indiana.  It will just be a few more weeks and we’ll know exactly what it is we’re dealing with.  We can follow up with treatment from there.”  He said.

   Dad’s had a mass since April, a malignancy in May, and now here we are in June no closer to knowing exactly WHAT it is.  The doctors are confident, why shouldn’t they be?  THEY don’t have cancer.  They diagnose, prescribe, examine, treat, and keep us waiting.  Dad’s already gone for several biopsies, CAT scans, and MRI’s.  Everything he’s gone through thus far was an attempt to have an answer.  Even after the surgery where the surgeon removed his kidney, the only thing we know is that this ISN’T Kidney cancer like they originally thought. 

   “It looks like it could be a P-net.”   Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumor; It’s called a p-net for short, an adolescent tumor that stems in the brain or spinal cord in children.  It’s a very rare cancer for an adult to have, and even more bizarre for it to form in the kidney.  Dad’s going to need a brain and spinal scan.  He is sitting at the front of the doctor’s desk, but it’s been close to two months since he’s been fully present.

   The passionate for pachyderm is dead serious in his stare behind his polished mahogany desk, looking gravely serious.  He is discussing how he and other board members have conferenced about this rare tumor that’s showing characteristics of two different cancer types.  Now all I can focus on (besides the cancer), is the hungry herd behind the doctor, with their varied trunk sizes and colors prominently displayed…….and dad’s ‘P-net’….which I’m now referring to as ‘P-nut.’

   “There’s gonna be a stampede;” I imagine the voice of Homer Simpson in my head.   

   I’m going to fall over.   My grin is turned so far up that it resembles a handlebar mustache that the baritone in a barbershop quartet may have. 

   Mom is sipping at her extra-large black decaf coconut coffee that accompanies her everywhere.  My father’s face is a huge pair of scared eyes; he reaches down and puts on his sunglasses.   My younger brother is asking questions that I can only hear as a muffled echo.  

   I am disappointed in myself.  I am all teehee, still amused at the elephants, the ‘p-net,’ looking around the room convinced that this is being taped for some reality show. 

   When I later recap my idiot self to Dawn, she understood my behavior from the second I mentioned my uncontrollable urge to giggle.  She recalls the time she came to tell me how she had Bell’s Palsy.  With a half pursed lip and an eyelid that wouldn’t close, she stared up at me through the window of my bedroom.  I was 24 at the time.  I looked down to her, my best friend, and laughed in her face.  She replied with almost no emotion, “Very nice,” and walked away.

   Normally, I am all sense and seriousness.  I can nurture, feel, and help to heal.  My kryptonite, I’ve learned, is all things that I have no control of; anything serious, lethal, or life changing.    Where many may not opt to talk about the ‘pink elephant’ in the room,

I choose to laugh at it.

Something nonsensical has me convinced,

that if I can just keep smiling-

   We can beat the cancer.