Читать книгу The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York - Peter Godwin - Страница 7

I have just returned from the doctor, who has managed to convince me that 1 am dying. The cause of my premature death will be the polyp that has developed under the skin of my left elbow. I became aware of it a few days ago as I walked along Hudson Street from the Printing House gym, favoured exercise yard of the West Village literati, back to our loft on Horatio Street. My polyp is hard to the touch, like a walnut, and curiously mobile. I fiddle with it constantly, my own internal worry bead.

At first I thought I had overdone it with the free weights. Although in denial about my own competitiveness, I am loath to lessen the weights when alternating on a machine with someone else of comparable size. Over the years I have sustained various injuries to ligaments and muscles due to such hubris, and this elbow polyp, I figured, was simply the latest. But there were worrying differences: the suddenness of my polyp’s first appearance. One minute nothing, the next a subcutaneous walnut. The lack of surrounding swelling. And the fact that it didn’t actually hurt. Finally, when the walnut refused to diminish on its own, I went to the doctor.

Under the American health insurance system my family doctor is, as far as I can deduce, a gatekeeper. He is there to prevent me from having access to specialists. The more often he can stymie my attempts to reach the doctors who really know what they’re doing, the expensive doctors, the more lavishly he is rewarded by our insurers.

Dr Epstein has a practice on 14th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenue. It is one of the most depressing streets downtown – not quite Chelsea, not yet Greenwich Village – strewn with tacky shops selling cheap plastic luggage and knock-off trainers, polyester clothes and tinny boom boxes. Many of the shops urgently proclaim that they are in the throes of closing-down sales, EVERYTHING MUST GO, their banners read. Several announce that they are going bankrupt and in POSITIVELY OUR VERY LAST WEEK. But in all the months I have traversed the street, none of these shops has actually closed.

The other patients waiting in Dr Epstein’s reception are all longshoremen – wide men in steel-toed boots, checked flannel shirts and jeans. For Dr Epstein’s practice is above the Longshoremen’s Union headquarters. My appointment comes and goes, but my name remains uncalled. Perhaps, among these giants, I am not big enough for my physical presence even to register.

‘Mr Gobwun?’

‘Godwin. It’s Godwin, actually.’

‘Whatever. Dr Epstein will see you now.’

Dr Epstein is small and hairy and rotund. He is evidently suffering from a terrible cold and his voice is clogged with catarrh. After taking a brief medical history, he places two stubby fingers on my polyp and chases it around my elbow. ‘Hmm,’ he muses. ‘Odd.’

Odd? I am a doctor’s son and I know that ‘odd’ is not good.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asks.

‘Not really.’

‘Is it growing?’

‘No, it was that size when it arrived.’

Dr Epstein rapidly fills out a large form. It is latticed with boxes, most of which he is ticking.

‘Tests,’ he explains. ‘You need tests, a lot of ’em.’

I feel like I’m in an opening sequence of ER, with the first plot line being wheeled in on the gurney while Dr Ross or Dr Green rattles off a battery of acronyms.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ I ask, realizing this should be his line.

‘Let’s just wait until the test results come in, shall we?’

‘But what kind of thing might it be?’ I insist.

‘Well, I’m really not sure, but …’ He trails off.

‘But what?’ I prompt.

‘It might be a lymphoma.’

Lymphoma, I know from ER, is American doctor-speak for cancer, and I return to our apartment in the West Village convinced that my future is mostly behind me.