“So, it says here that you have a history of cancer, right?” The doctor paused to listen for my brother’s answer, and I restrained myself from answering for him. It was late in July, and I had traveled from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to help my brother with his medical issues. A colonoscopy had found cancer in some polyps and the hospital had referred him to a surgeon to develop a plan to address that danger. I was sitting with him as the surgeon reviewed his medical records in preparation for his surgery. Clifford’s response to the doctor’s question surprised me: “I had a Wilms’ tumor.” I’d never heard him be so medically specific about the cancer that cost him a kidney when he was a child. I would hear him repeat that assertion in the days leading up to his August 26th surgery; my additions to his medical information, I learned, may have been inaccurate.
I have a clear memory of my youngest brother — the last of five of my mother’s children — as a child. I remember hearing my mother say that Clifford had cancer, and I have a sense of a hole in time when he was in the hospital. One kidney was removed, and there were follow-up visits, where radiation was applied to the other kidney. I saw a sullen black box on Cliff’s back, the burn from radiation applied to his remaining, healthy kidney. Each time that my mother brought my brother back from radiation therapy, she told her other four children that Clifford was to stay calm, and rest; Cliff leapt from the bed and, showing no apparent ill effects from the radiation, ran into the yard.
During this latest visit with him, I accompanied my brother to two other medical appointments prior to his surgery and would hear him say “Wilms’ tumor” twice more. At one of the appointments, I chimed in, saying that he had been diagnosed with the tumor at the age of 8, but when I did the math later, I realized that my information was incorrect. My mother is the only other person with intimate knowledge of his age at the time of the event, but she cannot be consulted as she is no longer alive. But in my research, I found that a Wilms’ tumor — nephroblastoma — is “a rare kidney cancer,” that “most often affects children ages 3 to 4 and becomes … less common after age 5.” Which told me that my brother could not have been diagnosed at 8 years of age, because I am 11 years older than he is, and at 19 years of age, was living in my own apartment. But hearing my brother name his tumor with such specificity was startling in another way.
One of the five books that I packed for my indefinite visit with my brother is a collection of short stories edited by David Sedaris. Children Playing Before A Statue Of Hercules has a story by Lorrie Moore: “People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling In Peed Onk.” In the story, a mother finds a blood clot in her child’s diaper. The surgeon says to the mother, “What we have here is a Wilms’ tumor.” I read those lines one day before I traveled 370 miles to my brother’s apartment, two days before the first time I ever heard him identify his tumor.
I read a lot, and I always marvel at the connections, the ways that my life touches the real and imagined landscapes of the writers I have chosen to add to my library.
cjon3acd@att.net