Michael Schwartz relates, with great emotional honesty and verbal diarrhoea, his trip to the gastroenterologist for a rectal biopsy.
I watch Dr. Klein smirk when I ask him why he took the biopsy, and he leans back in his deep gray leather chair behind his desk (the chair creaks, as does my heart) and pyramids his fingers and leans his chin, with conspiratorial confidence, and says, "Everything's fine, Michael. Don't worry," and I, not surprisingly, have to worry (I'm in a gastroenterologist's office, not a place where people who don't worry tend to congregate), because it may be difficult to ignore what happened to me a few moments ago while I, gaily innocent of my fate, was in that exam room just outside that door lying on my left side on the brittle white paper on the brown leather examining table facing the sallow and flaking wall while Dr. Klein primed by using multiple fingers and K-Y Jelly with practiced disregard and then inserted what felt like a mid-sized family sedan but was really an Olympus CF P20S flexible sigmoidoscope attached into an Olympus CLK-3 cold light supply and scoped too high, asked, "Can you feel that?" as I squirmed (can I feel it? I can taste it) and said just, "Uhnn," and wanted Dr. Klein to know that, no, I wasn't comfortable, didn't enjoy being here, when he ruined my inner monologue by abruptly standing and saying, curtly, too, "Don't move. I want to do a biopsy," and I blinked, which seemed, at the time, an acceptable response, and then tersely he yelled, "Alma?" and then the door opened and the receptionist, Mrs. Trott, came in, with whom I was used to having polite appointment discussions, fully clothed, too, and not with this thing sticking out of me, but, hey, she's something more than a receptionist, a supra-receptionist, a jack-of-all-receptionists, or a receptionist-plus-whatever-she-was-doing, which was holding a long thin steel wire, that is, it looked like steel when I glanced over my right shoulder to see Mrs. Trott holding the long thin steel wire with a plunger on the end and Dr. Klein fitting the other end of the long thin steel wire into the sigmoidoscope so I turned back to stare at the sallow and flaking wall and heard him say, "Now," and was somewhat petrified, in abstract fear, but not palpable fear, really, because palpable fear is a result of emotion and I had no emotion because I had an instrument the size of a 24-cubic-foot side-by-side refrigerator, with ice maker, stuck in my lower bowel instead, which tends to cancel most emotion, and conversation, and Dr. Klein repeated, "Now," quite grimly, too, and I glanced over my right shoulder, figuring, and here I'm going on pure instinct, while I should be trusting I should also be inquisitive, especially when I hear a gastroenterologist, especially
this gastroenterologist, say "Now Alma," whereupon I saw Mrs. Trott plunging the plunger and Dr. Klein taking out the long thin steel wire from the sigmoidoscope and putting something bloody (my bloody!), or at least red (my red!), into a vial, which he gave to Mrs. Trott, who now had two vials in her hand (two vials containing bits of red me!), and she took the long thin steel wire from Dr. Klein while I paled disconsolately and turned away again toward the sallow and flaking wall, and he said, "I'm finished now, Michael," and like a sensuous immersion into warm butter I felt the sublime pressure of the sigmoidoscope sliding out, feeling spent, flayed, flushed, finished, until this moment, this very moment, where I now sit opposite that toad-nosed and bat-eared pip of a doctor smugly smirking and pyramiding his flatulent fingers to ape concern while I, still throbbing and quite loose down there, construct my own diagnosis, and the prognosis isn't good, how could it be, and I wipe my brow to clear what's left of my life while I stare across the desk at that maggot-toothed slug-eyed practitioner of dissoluteness and malfeasance and see him slather his molars in anticipation with a tongue dipped in bile and leer deskward at me, and I figure when I lay my head one last time on the pillow of my cancerous-ridden misfortune my wife Barbara will pout Protestantly in mock concern and my mother will exude enormous chicken-fat encased globs of congealing pulsating guilt over my deathbed, and the white soft breath of my life will spin and spiral, like Sonja Henie, and soon, while all hold their breath, mine, rasping so laboriously, will dissipate, resembling the acting careers of Adam West and Linda Darnell.
Or I'll survive and have to deal with everything.
