Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession (20 page)

Now Nigel was whining
at me day and night (like this
was something new).
I decided to have
my
mammogram
in Seattle, since I really liked the hospital there, where I’d had my surgery and
Mammosite.

Two days before my flight,
The
B of A
called.
It was not a happy occasion.
They wanted their truck back.

“Let me think about it,” I told the
no-nonsense
rep
on
the phone.

“
If the
vehicle is not returned, I’ll have to report it as stolen.”

I called back in a few
.
“OK
,
I’m coming in out of the cold
.
Can I keep
the car till Friday?  I need to get to the airport.”

“Sure.
We can do that.
”
  Amazing. A human being.

“I’ll park in the Metrolink lot across from Burbank airport.
The
keys will be under the driver-side visor.”

I know.
Shades of, “Comrade
–
the
poison
soup will be served at Drago at dawn.”
But it all went down as planned, and I walked
past the lot
into
Burbank
, small suitcase in hand.
BING BING BING!
Another bumper hit on the Great Recession machine.
I could now add Repo to my Financial Hall Of Shame.
In L.A. terms, I’d
become
a
likely
target for arrest:
an Angelena without wheels.

Overlake.
The best hospital on the Eastside,
where I’d spent quality time in the new Maternity Wing. Don’t get any ideas: I was recovering from a hysterectomy, surrounded by two-day-old infants. We
all
should have been embossed on a coin
symbolizing
Woman’s Reproductive Cycle. In any case, the hospital was large and clean, and since
my last
visit, has added a bunch of buildings and the ultimate
status symbol:
An
off-ramp
of its own.

Overlake is stationed
in the
bourgeoisie
city
of Bellevue
, a Beverly Hills
Wannabe with its Jimmy
Choo and
Versace
.
Please! As if Bill Gates and his ilk would wear this kind of thing.
In the Northwest, it was all about
Gore-Tex
and plaid
–
topped off by hiking boots.

I took the elevator to Overlake’s second floor and
walked into
a familiar office.
The Breast Diagnostic Center.
Since I was
already
in the system,
form filling-out
was short
.
I
picked up
a trashy magazine.
Lindsay Lohan again; those
ubiquitous
Kardashians and reality “stars” I’d never heard of.
Now
, you could get famous just by flashing your tits.
I grinned.
Funny I would think of that in this S
anctuary To
T
he Breast.

“Amy Wolf.”
A smiling technician escorted me to the back.
The usual drill:
slip on the ugly smock, keep it
open
in
front; wip
e off any
clinging
deodorant.

There it was:
the machine.
It held no dread for me, since I’d been having mammograms from the age of twenty-eight.
I
’d
had a
host
of fibroid tumors
(benign)
, and they needed to be
monitored.
I grimaced as th
ey snapped my breasts into a vis
e, and when you’re 40DDD, trust me:
it hurts.
I held my breath as instructed;
assumed
poses
that would have made
Nijinsky
proud.
The technician went away.
She came back in a few.
They would like to do an ultrasound.
Just as a final
check.

I was not alarmed.
This had always been part of my drill.
I walked with her to another room with the requisite
terminal
and
exam table.
I lay down on my back.
The doctor came in, bearded, and I recognized him
from
last time
.
He was head of the department.
Ultrasound
gel
, pretty damned cold, was applied to the
left
side of my left breast.
Fascinated, I turned my head
toward the monitor.
I liked seeing my insides on TV.

The interior of the breast is like a moonscape, with dark craters
floating every few centimeters
.
The ultrasound mouse flew, like a spacecraft, over this placid surface,
marking crater after crater.
Suddenly, it stopped, deploying its landing craft.

I saw it the same time as the doctor.
A floating white
object
, perforated like coral, waving its tendrils slowly.
It
stood out in the black environment
.

“It’s positive, isn’t it?”
I turne
d to my white-coated colleague.

“Of course,
we’ll have to perform a biopsy, but I would say…
yes.
There’s a
strong
possibility
that
this is
a
carcinoma
.”
Goddamnit, not again!  His pronouncement stung like a jellyfish
. For
these were the words, Dear Reader, that
would take over
my life for the next
year-and-a-half.

They performed the biopsy
quickly,
a
nd
I got the results on
June 9th
, when I was back in L.A.
As in 2007,
I got The Call at work.
As in 2007, I took the news calmly.
This time, it was invasive
b
reast cancer,
Stage 2
, and I had tested positive for estrogen and HER-2.
One l
ymph node contained metatastic carcinoma.
This meant
something new – something I
hadn’t had
to deal with
during my first bout.

Chemo
.

“Aurora, I really want to have my treatment
up
in Seattle.
I trust the doctors there.
And I’m going to need a caretaker.
Right now,
Nigel’s
all I got
.
Are you sure you won’t come with me?
We could try to be a family again.”

“
FUCK NO
!
  I will not be in the same room as that pedophile!
”
Can you
say, “Oppositional
Defiance Disorder”?
I
started to make arrangements.
David had an older sister, Shawna, who’d just moved back
from Arizona
and was
looking
for a place.
I agreed to let her move in, to oversee her
brother
and Aurora.
Negligent, you say?
Have
you
ever rai
sed an
RAD
kid?

Once again, I was on a
Southwest
flight
north.
I reported back to Overlake
to have an MRI.
The
zaftig
girl
at reception
typed loudly
at
her
dumb terminal
, then frowned.
“You have California insurance.”

“Yes.”
Thank God I
had
insurance.
Rachel was paying for my COBRA
and Obama, in the
one
real
act he’d
performed
for the Recessed
, was assuming
65%
of the cost
.
U-S-A!
U-S-A!

“Well, this is Washington.”
Duh.
I could tell from the gray outside.
“We can’t take out-of-state carriers.”

“But it’s Blue Cross!”

“Of California.”

Ove
r
wrought,
I
made an exit worthy of Lady MacBeth
.
“Fine, I’ll just die of breast cancer then!”

“Sorry. . .”
her plaintive tones trailed me down the hall.

She was right.
The Breast Diagnostic Center had made a
ginormous
mistake:
they’d
accepted my insurance, and they shouldn't have.
My biopsy had been performed under
color of the wrong state.
The California Bear Flag,
which once flew over a nation,
was now staked across my left breast.

“One nation, indivisible. . .
”
Have you ever thought
about
how dy
sfunctional the state system is? W
ith fifty
sets
of laws, driver’s licenses, plates, insurance
, what was the
point
of
being a country
?
You practically need
ed
a v
is
a to move from one to the other
(“I’m sorry, Comrade.
The catalytic converter is not accepted here
.”)
I had floated between
states
enough
times
to know I was sick of
taking
the
driver’s test.
 
Each time, I got
100%.
Couldn't there be
an overall
pass,
l
ike the Disney
Park Hopper?

Sorry for the digression (be glad I’m not Victor Hugo –
he
burns
a hundred
pages
discussing the
Paris sewer
s
).
Clearly, I
needed
a
Plan B, and I
found
one
:
Nigel and I would drive to
L.A.
in his car
, and I would find a new set of doctors
, indigenous to
my
own
land.

We set out with our
Mom and pup
Sheltie
s,
Angel and Wee John
,
in a Saturn Ion filled to the roof
with belongings
.
I was
almost
looking forward to the trip, since we wouldn't hit any snow.
My complacency lasted for
all of
one day, when I received a series
of
calls:

1)
   
Aurora had
flipped
out at the thought of seeing Nigel, and had put
herself
back in DCFS
custody
.

2)
  
My
Canoga Park
landlord
had evicted me, since David – and his “good” (nonexistent) credit were gone.

In the course of ten minutes, I
had
lost a daughter and a home.
Two
weeks
after being diagnosed with cancer.
BING BING BING BING BING!
I’d just
scored
a free replay
, a
nd I wasn’t even tilting the machine.