or How to Kill an Entire Summer—Part II
The eighth thing the doctor’s staff was about to do to me was to take place as they escorted me down the hall to what looked like a new piece of equipment in a room tinier than the radiology room. A beautiful young woman with dark swooping hair stood by.
“This is my daughter,” Doctor V said, “blah blah blah, she’s out at the med school.” And she smiled at me.
Now, the good doctor told me to lie back in the chair. “It’s kind of like a recliner,” he informed me, “but it isn’t really built for the patient.”
No shit.
It was fucking hard—unforgiving, like a seat pulled from an old MG Midget—and I swear I think I remember there being stirrups for my legs. Of course, my pants were pulled down, and the good doctor seated, manning his equipment as if he were a jet pilot, pulling at this lever and that knob, typing shit onto his keyboard. He wrapped a piece of pale blue paper around my wee cock so that that was all that was showing, as if my cock were a discrete sort of apparatus—something in his way, not a precious portal to my innards. Doctor V injected some deadening gel into my cock, unfortunately not deadening enough. Before I could scream or in any way protest this brutal, barbaric treatment of my member, he slid a probe in there and kept shoving it inside until . . . then he brought to my attention two computer monitors joined together in a “vee” . . . and he, oh, by the way, it felt like my wee cock had been connected to an electric socket, especially when the flow of water meant to cool things down surged all around my wee urethra. Anyway, he talked me through it, narrating as everyone in that tiny room, including the doc’s daughter, for Christ’s sake, listened:
“Here’s your prostate,” he said, pointing to the monitor. “Except for being about twice as large as it was four years ago, it looks to be in good shape.” (Is this yet another problem I’ll have to face in the years to come?)
By then I realized my hands were grasping—no gripping—the armrests, reentering the earth’s atmosphere. Sweat flying from my forehead, challenging my deodorant. Then the doc gave me a good view of my bladder. It just appeared like pink skin to me.
Then, he announced, “I don’t like this,” and he made me turn my head while my hips make their Saint-Vitus-dance my hips dance so I could view the monitor to my left. “This is not good,” he said, pointing out a whitish, lacey-looking growth. “We’ll have to shave it off.”
“Today?” I asked, alarmed that I might have to squirm through yet another procedure.
“No,” he said, looking at me funny. “No, we’ll set up a hospital appointment. You’ll be sedated.”
“Thank Christ,” I mumbled, hoping my curse hadn’t offended anyone.
All in all, I was in that office for nearly three hours. Must have been sixty of us being shuffled in and out of those wee, antiseptic rooms like Marx Brothers’ characters—peeing in cups, giving up blood, having x-rays taken, being prodded and poked—then escorted back to what nurses kept referring to as the lobby, as if we were guesting ourselves at the Waldorf-Astoria—made to sit and wait (it was a waiting room, let’s be clear) for the next round of torture.
But then, there was no more. I was told I would appear at Lubbock's Covenant Hospital on July 7, where the doctor would “shave” the tumor and have it biopsied. Yippee!
NEXT TIME: In “It Only Hurts When I Pee, Part III,” I give you Dr. V’s blow-by-blow description of what is to come.