Like many doctors, I am reluctant—no, downright averse—to subjecting myself to an annual physical. In the first place, or so goes our reasoning, I am myself an ordained physician, fully capable of diagnosing whatever might ail me, prescribing the proper protocol to correct the problem, administering said treatment in the most efficacious manner, and thus in the fullness of time . . . of healing myself. This despite my seemingly limited medical specialty, which is the human eye in all its aqueous good humor.
In the second, I know that if I submit my frail flesh to the scrutiny of a colleague, the bastard will certainly find something wrong with me. This in turn will only lead to a lot of what my Jewish colleagues call tsuris. Once you’re in our clutches, we never let you go. Not until the last shovel of dirt falls on your coffin lid. You can’t really blame us, though. It’s what we’re trained to do. And, too, many of us are just in it for the money.
And I’m proud to admit that I made a bundle of it over my forty-year career as an ophthalmologist. By the time I retired from practice last year—the last year of the ultraviolent twentieth century (lots of ocular trauma!)—I’d salted away nearly a quarter of a gigabuck, most of it paper money admittedly, from market investments, and lived disgustingly well in the process.
After graduating from Marquette University med school in 1957 I served out my internship and residency in the U.S. Navy, first at the naval hospital in San Diego and then on an attack transport, the USS Talladega (APA 208) attached to Phibron Seven, home ported in Long Beach, California. On the Douche Boat, as we called her, we cruised the western Pacific, stopping at such exotic ports of call as Sasebo and Yokosuka in Japan; Inchon, Pusan, and Wonsan in South Korea; Taipei on the ChiNat island of Taiwan; Iwo Jima; Okinawa; and Guam, not to mention my favorite liberty ports, Dingalan Bay and Zamboanga and Olangapo-Where-the-Sewer-Meets-the-Sea in the sunny Philippine archipelago.
Most of the medical emergencies I dealt with in the Navy were of the gonorrheal persuasion, though now and then a whitehat would knock a shipmate’s jaw adrift from its moorings, or fall down a ship’s ladder in heavy seas, sustaining minor fractures and contusions. Once, in the midst of a typhoon en route from Pearl Harbor to Midway, a first-class bosun’s mate named Boynton reported to sickbay with a bad bellyache.
The poor guy was running a temp of 103 and already starting to hallucinate. Classic signs of acute appendicitis. I palpated his hairy lower abdomen and discovered that the peccant appendage was about to rupture, flooding the poor salt’s innards with poison. I sent a corpsman with word to the officer of the deck that I wanted to perform an emergency appendectomy before it was too late. Emergency surgery at sea, in the grip of a typhoon no less—this was the stuff that articles in the New England Journal of Medicine are made on, and thus reputations . . .
The skipper paged me on the 1-MC—“Now hear this. Doc Taggart, report to the bridge on the double. Doc Taggart to the bridge, ASAP.”
The ship was wallowing like the pig she was, taking green water over the bow and tossing great swimming-pool loads of it eighty feet high onto the flying bridge. Each scoop of seawater hit with a crash that made the old tub shudder clear down to her keel. I scrambled up the slick wet ladders topside, squinting against waves of windblown drift that cut like a horsewhip, drenched to the skin by the time I reached the Old Man.
His name was Harold W. Becker, USN, a tall, square-shouldered four-striper, and the best skipper—the best man—I ever served with, military or medical. He stood there ramrod straight in his black foul-weather gear, swaying with the ship’s pitch and roll like a white pine in a windstorm, the braid and scrambled eggs on his hat gone puke green with salt corrosion. He had the chinstrap pulled down tight under his lantern jaw, to keep the hat from going adrift in the breeze, and I was surprised to see by the light of the radar console that he needed a shave—but then, we’d been eighteen hours in the grip of this typhoon and he hadn’t left the bridge in all that time, except once, the OOD told me, to take a whiz in his cabin.
“You want to cut this kid wide open, Doc?” he said. “In seas like this?”
“I have to, Captain, otherwise his appendix will pop and all the penicillin in the Pacific won’t likely save him.”
“Can you do it with the ship tossing like this?”
At that moment the Douche Boat pitched up her bow nearly to the vertical, then rolled almost perpendicular to the hollow of the seas. We both skidded ten feet sideways. I looked up. The slashing, moaning, white-maned crests of the waves were taller than the kingposts.
“I can secure him on the operating table with sandbags and strap him down tight, sir. Sedate him into cloud-cuckoo-land. Then if you can put her bow into the wind and hold her steady, I’ll whip that nasty thing out, quick as a cat, pack him with antibiotics, and zip him back up again. Whole thing won’t take fifteen minutes.”
He gave me a dubious look.
“Level with me, Doc. You’re not just doing this to get in the medical journals, are you?” He watched my eyes. His were like bright blue drill bits.
“N-no, sir,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “What would be your best considered alternative, if it came to that?”
“Well, sir, I could pack his lower abdomen in ice to reduce the internal swelling and lower his body temp, shoot him up with penicillin, and dose him with febrifuges. Then we could hope this weather blows through and head for Midway or Wake, whichever is nearest when we come clear. An appendectomy would be a cinch on dry land. But how long will it take us to get out of this weather, sir? How long to reach Wake or Midway?”
“Quartermaster of the watch?”
That worthy, who’d been listening in on our conversation as had all the watchhands, bent over his chart with parallel rules and protractor and quickly paced off the distance on a rhumb line.
“At least twelve hours to Midway, sir. Sixteen or more to Wake. That’s figuring flank speed, maybe eighteen knots—all she’ll turn without blowing a boiler, sir.”
Captain Becker stroked his chin. It rasped, and he got a sour look on his face. “Can he last that long without popping his guts?” he asked me.
“I doubt it, sir.”
He pondered a moment more. Then, “Okay, Doc. I can rig a sea anchor to hold her head into the wind and steady her down a bit more, once we’ve turned her bow into the seas. Lay below and have at it. Pass the word when you’re ready to slice.”
It never came to pass. Boatswain’s Mate First Class William J. Boynton, USN, proved allergic to anesthesia. At the first whiff of ether he erupted from his bed of sandbags, ripped the mask from his face, burst the straps that bound him to the table, staggered to his feet on the heaving deck, and with a Gaelic roar came at the attending anesthetist, Dr. Heracles Zagoras, the ship’s dentist, with clear intent to inflict grave bodily harm. My corpsmen had a hell of a time subduing him.
Once the boatswain was quiescent again, we had to fall back to Plan B. The icebags, antibiotics, febrifuges, and a mild diet of pablum and fruit juices kept Boynton’s appendix intact until we reached Subic Bay in the Philippines. There he underwent an appendectomy in the naval hospital and was soon on his feet again. Indeed, the night before we left that port for Cap San Jacques in troubled French Indochina, I saw him outside the Papagayo Bar & Grill in downtown Olangapo, the scuzzy brothel town that served Subic in those days when we still had a naval presence in the Philippines. The bosun was reeling with drink as he duked it out with a whitehat off another APA, our sister ship and squadron rival, the Okanogan. As I recall, Boynton was so well recovered that he knocked his opponent—splat on his keister—into the Shit River (yes, that was indeed its name), which slouched sludgily through town at that point.
I rather liked Boynton, not simply for his swift recovery from an infection that would have laid low a lesser man, but also because he reminded me of my old high school pal Ben Slater. I’d had only two letters from Ben since our memorable canoe trip on the Firesteel River in the fall of 1950. One was postmarked from Inchon, where he joined his USMC outfit that fall. Korea was a rathole, he said. Little kids everywhere selling chewing gum, Korean booze, shoelaces, and their sisters. Artillery fire w/ accompanying muzzle flash evident just beyond the hooches of town. The big surprise was when his nemesis from boot camp had joined his platoon—Sergeant Fuckin’ Stingley, his old drill instructor. Their unit was deploying shortly for the east coast, he said. A place called Wonsan. That letter was dated October 24.
The second one reached me just after Christmas. He’d mailed it from Yokosuka, where he was cooped up in the big naval hospital, recovering from frostbite and a few “minor nicks and perforations,” as he put it. “Nothing worse than after a football game.” He’d been in the big fight up near the Chosin Reservoir, where the First Marine Division had fought its way out of a trap when the ChiComs invaded. “You think Wisconsin’s cold in the winter,” he said, “you oughta come to Frozen Chosin.” When he was patched up, he said, he was heading back for the MLR—the Main Line of Resistance—up near the thirty-eighth parallel. “Trench warfare,” he said, “just like France in ’17 and ’ 18. Ho-hum . . . .”
I got to Wonsan myself eight years later, on the Talladega. We were ferrying a regiment of ROK troops over there from Inchon. The fighting part of the war was long over, though sporadic ambushes flared now and then like endemic fever along the DMZ. The ROKs were tough, thieving little fuckers. They were desperate for anything they could swipe from us. One of them reached through the porthole in the navigator’s stateroom while he was dozing in his fartsack one evening after chow. “I saw this arm come in and sniff around like a blind dog,” he told us later in the wardroom. “The fingers touched the washbasin, just grazed my tube of toothpaste, felt and rejected a bar of soap, then glommed on to the blackout curtain over the port and lifted it. I jumped up and yelled. The steward’s mates came swarming topside and nailed the guy redhanded. The OOD turned him over to the cognizant ROK authorities.”
Next morning we landed the ROKs, and the crew of the first Papa boat that returned to the ship was white faced. “Jesus, Doc,” the coxswain told me. “You know that poor ROK dogface who stole Mr. McGrath’s curtain? They marched him behind a sand dune, jabbered a few words in gook, lined up a firing squad, and shot the fucker. Bingo! Like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Just saving face,” I told him.
Later on that same visit I had to go ashore myself, to pick up some medical supplies. It was winter, black ice in the roadside puddles, corpses of homeless civilians who’d frozen or starved to death lying in the unpaved streets. I accidentally kicked one and he crunched like a popsicle. I had to carry a loaded Colt .45 on such trips, there were rip-off artists everywhere ashore, Koreans and round-eyes both. On my way back to the boat landing where the LCVP was standing by for me, a Korean in padded gray cotton pajamas jumped out from between two hooches and made a snatch for the satchel of drugs I was carrying—ampules of penicillin, mostly, but some morphine Syrettes as well. I fought him for it but he was stronger than he looked. I fumbled the .45 from its holster, let go of the bag, jacked the slide, and pointed the pistol at him.
“Hands up!”
“Fuck you, lound-eye.” He flipped me the finger.
One of my Marine escorts shot him. His sternum collapsed as he fell, imploding inward. A concavity the size of a softball. He geysered blood from mouth and nostrils. His eyes stared up at me, glazing fast . . .
“Not to worry, sir,” the SPs told me. “This guy’s a Commonist, sure as shit. We’ve been lookin’ for the fucker high and low. There’s some wounded Chinks hid out somewhere in the boonies and they need medicine.”
Ah, the Navy. Those were the last of the biblical “seven lean years” for me. But it wasn’t all Sturm und Drang. I loved the Navy, particularly being at sea, cruising independently from island to island, continent to continent, the timeless empty gray days of wind and weather, the Pacific spreading out unto eternity so that you felt you’d never see land again, and it was a good feeling; pilot whales broaching like enormous bubbles of black glass alongside and wheezing their misty spouts skyward; then the water going electric blue as we entered the Philippine Sea, porpoises flirting with the bow waves, flying fish skimming the trade wind and sometimes hitting the deck by miscalculation, flopping steely bluegray in the gunwales, and the Filipino mess boys scuttling to pick them up before they flipped themselves back overboard . . . . The Filipinos who prepared our wardroom meals of iridescent green beef and sodden gray potatoes always cooked up a mess of sticky rice, bamboo shoots, tropical greens, and fresh, stir-fried fish for themselves. My cabin was right up the ladder from the officers’ galley, and sometimes in the late afternoons I’d be snoozing in my fetid rack when the aroma of their supper reached me. I would begin to dream of the Firesteel and the meals Ben and I prepared at night with the trout we’d caught—way back when, in our boyhood.
After the Navy I joined an eye practice in Santa Monica. It was owned by two old ophthalmologists who were looking for young blood. Old, I say. They were about forty-five. But already they’d earned enough, even in those days, before lasers, cataract surgery, and corneal transplants, to pull the pin. There’s a lot of money in eyeglass frames. They wanted someone to buy out their practice and I was the golden boy. I’d met and married Kate during my last year in the Navy. Kate Winston, nee. She was a registered nurse at the naval station clinic in Long Beach, a leggy, bright, witty blonde from Des Moines, Iowa, with a taste for jazz. She caught me one night at the Blue Note West in Redondo Beach while I was riffing with some black cats from K.C. She dug my sax. She dug my sex. She scraped up the dough to help me buy out the old farts who ran the eye practice. She bore me three kids, two boys and a girl. Our daughter, Taffy, married well but moved to Wales with her husband, a professor of ethnology at Aberystwyth. We have made trips over there now and then, and it’s not the same. One of the boys—Frank, the eldest and my favorite—was killed in the carbombing of the Marine HQ in Lebanon. October 23, 1983. I’ll never forget that date. A Marine, yes, like my old friend Ben Slater. The younger son, Eddie, majored in economics at Berkeley, took an MBA at Wharton, and disappeared into the canyons of Wall Street. We hear from him three times a year, on our birthdays and at Xmas, tasteful Hallmark cards every time.
I piled up the shekels, year after year, bought IBM in the ’50s, invested in offshore oil, caught Xerox early on, then Wal-Mart, cashed in on the Silicon Valley boom, made a killing in spousal abuse—every wife-beater left me a thousand bucks richer for each eye he blackened; I cheered them on. No, I didn’t. I hate the bastards.
We built a house in Palos Verdes on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, a sprawling stucco hacienda with a red tile roof, all grown around with succulents and pampas grass, with a big slate deck and a kidney-shaped pool. Kate and I shot clays off that deck, hunted valley and mountain quail from El Centro to Bakersfield. Even up into Oregon sometimes. She was a natural wingshot, wiping my eye at trap and skeet with the nifty little 28-gauge Parker I gave her on our first wedding anniversary.
Later, we built another place, a redwood log cabin up near Bishop in the High Sierra. We fished trout there, but it wasn’t the Firesteel by a long shot. I bought a forty-five-foot Norwegian ketch, a double-ender, clinker-built. Oak and pine, brass brightwork and teak deck, heavy and somewhat slow in stays but capacious and weatherly. We painted her hull bright scarlet and rechristened her Red Orm, for the hero of a Viking sea saga I loved, The Long Ships, by Frans Bengtsson. Kate and I cruised her whenever I could get away from the practice—long voyages, down the Baja to Cabo and beyond, clear up to Anchorage a few times. Once as far as the Cocos, off Ticoland.
I fished hard on those trips, always had a line or two out with a spinner trolling astern, stopped to cast a jigging rod whenever we saw albacore or bonita breaking; off the Revilla Gigedos, south of Cabo about two hundred miles, caught a yellowfin tuna over two hundred pounds, great sashimi, sliced still quivering from its flank, dark red fine-grained meat, cold as the sea herself, with plenty of wasabe and soy sauce; big wahoo as well, though not as good raw—and horse-eye jacks on the flyrod at night, under the searchlight on the transom, when we were anchored off Clarion that time, or was it San Benedicto? Up north, the big tyee and halibut that could break your arm if you gaffed them wrong, silvers and sockeyes on the Four Weight, strong tough swift steelhead in the Babine and Alaska’s Situk River. But none of them matched the thrill of the Firesteel. Maybe it’s the water.
I played my sax at dawn and sunset while we were at sea, did-dybopping with the gulls, summoning up cetaceans . . .
Kate died two months ago. July 10th of the first year of the new fucking millennium. A stroke, while playing tennis with her lady friends, five days after I’d sold the practice and retired. We were fitting out Red Orm for a long cruise this fall to the Marquesas, Tahiti, and the Tuamotus. I buried her, sold the ketch, and then started drinking in earnest. The kids made a one-day appearance for the funeral and then split. I don’t blame them. No, I don’t. Not a bit. I don’t blame them at all. Really . . .
I found myself pissing six times a night. Thought it might be the booze. I quit. I still pissed, every hour on the hour. Good thing I’d sold the boat. I could never have single-handed her to the mid-Pacific unless I wore a diaper at the helm.
Diabetes? I tested my blood. Negative.
The Big PC?
There was no way I could palpate my prostate all by myself.
I went to Jack Trevanian, a urologist pal I’d played poker with for many years. Okay, against my better judgment. But what the hell. Tests. PSA through the roof. A mindboggling forty-five. The biopsy in Jack’s office. It took only a minute, no pain on a local anesthetic. Rectally. With the “gun” that propels a needle very fast, like the tongue of a snake, into various areas of the prostate, nipping out samples with every lick.
These samples will not only detect a malignancy, but will show whether it’s slow moving, “nonaggressive,” or a metastatic meteor. Or somewhere in between. The scale runs from one to ten. With a ten, you might as well write yourself off.
I waited out the results of the biopsy. I went back to drinking and pissing. No, I’d never given up pissing. I was pissing my life away. Maybe I’d already done it. I was dying. Or maybe not. I didn’t know. Or at least I didn’t know when. All I knew was that I’d fallen into their hands. From here on out I faced a series of time-consuming, ever more depressing tests—sonograms, MRIs, bone scans, CAT scans, X-ray sessions, rectal prods and probes, clever, dancing fingers up the bunghole, and the sad, hopeful smiles of underpaid female assistants. Not to mention the bills I’d get from my compatriots, the ultimate reaming.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Five days later Jack called. “Well, old buddy, I won’t beat about the bush. It’s positive. Six of the ten spots I tested. Looks like it’s about a nine on the Gleason Scale . . . ”
“Don’t you mean the Richter Scale? Hyper-fucking-aggressive.”
“Very.”
“What’s next?”
“Well, we’ll have to see if it’s metastasized, like into your bones or your colon. Hell, it could pop up almost anywhere, Harry. I’m afraid you’re in for a lot of clinic time. Bring a book along—they’re pretty busy right now. We’ll start with an MRI . . . ”
I hung up.