The Walls Came Down

Chapter 3 – Tom, Chicago

CHAPTER 3 – TOM

CHICAGOTom’s appointment coincided with a snow flurry in Chicago, which had arrived unseasonably late, as it was already the start of spring. He’d woken up to a whirlwind of white outside his window, and in those first few moments of wakefulness he wondered whether he was still dreaming. But what was a dream and what was reality had lately become a puzzle to him. His mind had begun to produce strange images – blurred memories appeared before him in the middle of the day, when he was resting with a book, or watching a baseball game on TV, as if they were really happening, right there in his living room.

He blamed it on exhaustion at first, and the difficult readjustment from what had been an incredibly busy working life, to one which had recently become the exact opposite of that.

“It’s what retirement does to you,” Mitch had told him, only half-joking. “You stop doing useful things and your brain turns to mush. You become bone idle, and then that bone idleness tires you out, and you become a shadow of what you used to be.”

So maybe at first, the tiredness was exactly that. But since his sixtieth birthday at the end of January, it had become progressively worse. Sometimes Tom was so tired, that he couldn’t bend his arms to lift himself out of bed in the morning. And he wasn’t hungry. Often he would accidentally miss breakfast and lunch, surviving until five in the afternoon on nothing more than a mug of black coffee.

By late March the vomiting had started. He’d suspected food poisoning – it was quite possible that the chicken he’d cooked for dinner that day had a tinge of pink inside. But then it happened again two days later and again at the end of the week. When he felt a dull ache in his stomach, he begrudgingly rang his doctor – a young, eager trainee, who referred him straight to the hospital.

So Tom forced himself into his stiff corduroy winter trousers noting with some anxiety the gap between the waistband and the cold, pale skin of his abdomen. He put on a thick cotton vest under his shirt, doubled up his socks, and emerged into the falling snow.

The unexpected snow had slowed the city. His bus crawled at a snail’s pace through the western suburbs, the driver apologising over the intercom about ‘delays due to poor visibility’. Tom, as always, had left himself plenty of time to get to his destination so he wasn’t worried. He gazed stoically out of the window at the blizzard, enjoying the ethereal feeling that it created, until it suddenly, unexpectedly, brought with it the hot sting of nostalgia. Snow always reminded Tom of his youth and now, in a moment of remembrance so strong he could almost have been there, he saw his younger self as he hurled his body onto the white ground, spreading his arms wide and waving them up and down, to create the imprint of an angel. He had long forgotten what it had felt like to be so spontaneous, so carefree.

The vision was still in his mind when he finally emerged in front of the grey monolith of the University of Chicago Medical Centre. The snow had since turned to an unpleasant sleet, which raged across the square, swirling among the chaos of ambulances and taxis. He breathed in deeply, bracing himself for a morning of unpleasant waiting.

The foyer was filled with people and wheelchairs, all moving in different directions. He took his place in the queue that had formed in front of the reception desk, and was directed to the seventh floor, where, after a few wrong turns, he eventually managed to find the right department.

He was asked to sit on a grey plastic chair in a waiting room filled with an assortment of people of all ages and backgrounds. He surveyed them for signs of illness, but to his disappointment, there was nothing obvious. No hacking coughs, nobody clutching their stomach, nobody even looking particularly pale.

The chair that he was sitting on had a hard and uncomfortable backrest, and a slippery seat, so he was constantly having to reposition himself. Fifty minutes later, his surname was finally called and he went in to see the consultant.

The door was opened by another absurdly young man. Tom almost laughed aloud, because, with his white coat and the stethoscope casually swung around his neck, he looked like a caricature of a doctor. He smiled broadly and motioned for him to come into a brightly lit, white room in which there was nothing but two hardback chairs and a desk. Behind this desk, a woman with a high forehead and a pair of round, oldfashioned glasses on her nose was typing. She reminded Tom of a cartoon owl. The young doctor indicated one of the chairs and said, “She’ll be with you in a minute.”

Eventually, The Owl stopped typing and raised her eyes – looking straight at Tom, but with a blank expression, as if he were quite invisible and the seat before her was in fact filled with nothing but air.

“Hello Mr. Mason,” she said slowly. So she could see him after all.

“How are you feeling?”

He was stunned by the question.

“Very bad actually,” he said without hesitation, “That is why I’m here.”

“Yes of course. But I meant, how are you feeling in relation to your visit to the doctor a couple of weeks ago?” She consulted the notes. “How are the symptoms?”

He took time describing his symptoms. He knew that she could see the notes about the weight-loss and the vomiting – that hadn’t changed, so he didn’t mention it. Instead he brought up the itchy skin and exhaustion, and he noted that she raised her eyebrows. He groaned internally. He shouldn’t have said it. Who complains about itchy skin? She will have already written him off as a time-waster and a hypochondriac, and those were two things which Tom Mason prided himself on not being.

“And you have a history of alcoholism. Is that correct?”

He liked that she didn’t beat about the bush. Others had called it ‘a slight problem with his drinking’, ‘an overindulgence.’

“Yes, I did,” he admitted, “I did for many years. But I have been sober since 2001.”

“Right.”

“And your appetite hasn’t improved.”

“No. I wouldn’t say so. No.”

Tom wondered why she wasn’t typing. Surely, she should be frantically hitting the keys in response to what he was saying? He’d assumed that like many in the medical profession, she was constantly in a hurry, ready to get through her quota of patients for the day with as much speed as possible. He had seen constant news reports on how over-worked doctors were.

But The Owl put her hands flat on the table (he noted the bitten down fingernails) and looked at him long and hard, with a sad seriousness. There was something in her facial expression that made the beetle crawl of anxiety start up in his stomach.

It was at that moment that he considered the real possibility that he could be truly, seriously ill. Until now, he was treating the whole thing as a mere collection of annoying symptoms that he needed to get rid of, so that he could get on with what he was supposed to be doing, which was enjoying himself. Wasn’t that what retirement was? A chance to relive your youth with all the knowledge and the money that forty years of hard work brings with it? And he had a more than decent amount of money stashed away in the bank, and nobody to spend it on but himself. He’d planned to start painting. It was a desire that he still had after so many years. He’d even gone to a*****e on North Lincoln Avenue back in December to buy an easel, some canvases and oil paint. But then his health troubles set in and he’d never actually gotten round to picking up a paintbrush.

He considered for the first time what it might be like to die. Who was it who said that we all essentially died alone? Tom had never understood what this meant. He supposed that the speaker was referring to the fact that no matter how many people you had around you, the physical act of dying was happening to nobody but you. It was a horrible, intimate event in which by all intents and purposes you were alone. Family and friends could only make the run-up to it more bearable, and he wouldn’t even have them, well apart from perhaps Mitch and Sally.

“So, what happens now?” he asked weakly.

“Right, well – we need to do a few tests to enable me to eliminate a few things.”

“You think I have cancer,” he blurted out.

The Owl seemed annoyed at this outburst. He wasn’t playing along with the conversation that she had planned for him – she presumably had the same dialogue prepared for all of her patients.

“No. That’s not what I said, is it?” she asked in a tired voice. “We need to rule out some possibilities so that we can then move onto diagnosing you properly. That’s how medicine works.”

Tom wasn’t at all sure whether that was how medicine worked, but he thought it better not to say anything.

An overwhelming sense of fear had gripped him with such force that he felt suffocated by it. He had the ludicrous thought that if he were going to die, he would prefer to go right now, before he found out any bad news.

“Are you OK?” asked the young doctor, who had been hovering at the other end of the desk. “Can I get you a glass of water?”

Tom ignored him.

“Do you think it’s likely that I have cancer?” he said, not looking at either of them.

There was a momentary silence before The Owl spoke.

“It’s possible. I wouldn’t say that it’s probable, but it’s certainly possible. It’s not right for me to give you any percentage of likelihood at this stage. We’re going to do a scan of your abdomen and we’ll go from there.” She gave him a date for the scan, which was on Thursday of the same week, three days away. Weren’t there usually weeks and weeks of waiting for these appointments?

“So soon?” he asked weakly.

“Yes, we had a cancellation. And it’s better to get these things done as quickly as possible,” she said.

When Tom left the hospital, the ethereal snow had disappeared for good, and the rain pounded down from a blanket of thick, dark grey cloud. It was time to get back home before he got drenched, but he was too tired to run to the bus stop. He was too tired to do anything anymore.