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over onto my other side. It would be nice if he’d give some indication as to what he thought about the first kidney, but apparently he likes to take in the whole show before offering his review, and while I could ask him, I’m suddenly superstitious about upsetting his ritual, so I roll over silently, the gown sticking to me uncomfortably where the gel remains. He spends another minute or so examining my left kidney and then says, “Lie flat on your back, please.”
    The left kidney seems to take even less time than the right, which is probably a good sign, indicating that there was simply nothing to see. Unless the left kidney was so obviously cancer infested, just riddled with throbbing tumors, that it only took an instant for him to know that I’m totally fucked, and now he’s having me lie on my back in case I pass out when he breaks the news to me. Or maybe the right kidney is the bad one, so all the left one required was a perfunctory check, because he’s already ascertained that I’m totally fucked. I lie on my back, and now I’m sweating, can feel my heart accelerating in my chest. Forget the cancer—I’m going to die of a massive coronary right here.
    He pulls up my gown like a perverted uncle and squirts some more of the cold gel all over my pelvis. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on nothing but moving the air in and out of my lungs. I do this for a while, until it occurs to me that he’s been working down there for quite some time, rubbing the probe just off my pelvic bone and clicking his mouse repeatedly. I open my eyes and am instantly terrified by the furrow in his brow and the way his eyebrows seem to be raised. “What are you doing?” I ask him.
    “I’m looking at your bladder,” he tells me distractedly as if he’s forgotten there was a person attached to the lower half he was examining.
    “Everything okay?”
    “Hmm,” he says.
    You never, under any circumstances, want to hear your doctor say “Hmm.” “Hmm” being medical jargon for “Holy shit.” “What is it?” I say.
    He turns the TV monitor toward me and I’m treated to the sight of the dark, quivering horror movie of my bladder wall. “There,” he says, using a mouse to draw a small circle on the screen. “Do you see that?”
    “What?”
    “This brighter spot over here.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “What is it?”
    Dr. Sanderson peers intently at the screen, nodding slowly. “I’m not sure,” he says, and just like that, everything changes.
    I sit in a puddle of my own sweat, my gown pasted to my gel-splattered sides as my bladder pulsates grotesquely before me, and the room starts to spin. I stare at the little spot distorted into gray nothingness by the TV monitor, and say nothing. The doctor is telling me that it could be some aggregate capillaries, nothing to worry about, and I need to come back tomorrow for a cystoscopy so he can get a better look, just to be sure, but his voice is distant and hollow sounding. He may not know yet what that spot is, but I know what it is definitely not.
    It’s not nothing.

Chapter 6
    I leave the doctor’s office in a haze, thoughts of cancer running rampant through my head. I won’t make a good cancer patient; this much I know. I won’t discover within me heretofore untapped reserves of strength, will not lift everyone else’s spirits with my courage, will not be funny and frank about my illness and wear a clever hat when my hair falls out. I am just not movie-of-the-week material. Probably, I’ll be a weeping, vomiting mess, will hide in my room, curled up pathetically in a self-pitying fetal ball as I fade into nothingness. I will be a big, fucking baby.
    I want my mother.
    My cell phone tells me that I have seven missed calls. The middleman must always be reachable. I resist the powerful, almost inborn instinct to check my voice mails. There’s no way I can work with this hanging over me. I hold up the cell phone and just look at it, wondering what the hell to do.