Thursday, April 29, 2021

Enough for Now

I’m being watched, tracked, followed. Prostate, thyroid, dry eyes. My heart and sludgy arteries, my deaf ear, (the hearing gone suddenly one winter morning when I was 49) and now the skin, the very architecture of my body –- the café-au-lait birthmark that maps the terrain of my left arm and chest, which has birthed two melanomas, the second one larger than the first. It’s always on my left side that things go wrong – left eye (dry), left hip (shattered in a car accident when I was 5), left forearm (sliced deep in another childhood accident) and now a suspicious mole – one of many, but this one hidden, stealthy, the melanoma embedded in one of a hundred moles on that arm, layered on the birthmark that encircles my biceps and triceps. After two rounds of melanoma 15 years apart, twice blessed as they were caught early by the same specialist, I lay face up in a long tube, the rectangular lens pressed in so close that I’m convinced it will bore into my face, shoulder, upper arm. The machine zaps and sputters, snapping pics, tracing potential pathways into my lymph nodes. I hope to come up clear, to dodge another bullet despite my redhead’s complexion, my “Jewish-Irish” skin. Freckles I’d ignored until my early 40s morph, blend and darken. I do not trust the surface of my own body. My skin is too light, permeable, transparent, without the protective shell of coloration. The left side is my history, a map of accidents, disease, a human jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces missing. I wear that history on my body. Meanwhile, my right side marches forward stoically as the left veers off course. I lurch this way and that and try to maintain my balance, to ignore the wear and tear of sixty years, to deny what my body is trying to tell me. I am an antique, a 1957 Studebaker, long out of warranty, no longer in production. I need service, repair, a patch job. But the manufacturer makes no promises; many of my contemporaries are no longer on the road, replaced by newer, sleeker models with smooth skin, flawless bodies, shiny coats. In my 20s, 35 seemed middle-aged, 45 almost elderly. Today, I’ve stretched the upper limit to 65, but now I’m pushing up against that glass ceiling, one I don’t want to shatter. Still, it beats the alternative. Living through a pandemic, there are constant reminders that life is tenuous, uncertain, not to be taken for granted. Those reminders gibe with this moment, when I find myself rolling toward the OR in Mass General Hospital’s Lunder Cancer Building for something called a “wide excision” of the melanoma, that tiny mole on my left arm –- which will leave me with a six-inch long scar, a snaky line –- and removal of several lymph nodes, to see if the cancer has spread inside my body. I come through the surgery, emerging from the general anesthesia three hours after I went under, encased in gauze, numb. The next week is hazy, a blur, as I move gingerly from one room to the next in my apartment, relying on my good right arm to wash up, get dressed, feed the cat. Before surgery, the oncologist tells me I have 90/10 odds –- just a 10% chance that the cancer has reached my lymph nodes. Still, I wonder how I would handle living with active cancer, of moving from Stage 1 to Stage 3, the countdown clock ticking ever louder in my bad ears. A week later, I call his office to discuss my symptoms. The doctor is out of town, so I ask his nurse-practitioner when I might get my biopsy results. “I’m looking at your report now,” she says. “It’s all good—your lymph nodes are clear.” Four weeks post-surgery, my arm aches, lymph fluid has pooled inside my armpit, I have minor complications. A two-time skin cancer survivor, I must be vigilant –- another condition to watch. Still, I’m alive and relatively healthy. That’s enough for now.

Sunday, April 11, 2021

The View from Here: My Life in Late Middle Age

The View from Here--Judah Leblang/2021 I’m coming up on another birthday, (my 64th) an occasion I’m celebrating with mixed emotions. On the one hand it beats the alternative; especially in the age of COVID; on the other I am shocked that this –- my arrival in the land of late middle age –- is happening to me. A few years ago, when I turned 60, I threw myself a party to chase away the blues and received a bunch of birthday cards –- some funny, some almost cruel. One friend reminded me that I was entering my 7th decade and was now “older than most houses, trees, and even some towns.” This gave me pause, as I considered where middle age ends and old age begins. According to Merriam-Webster, the middle years last from 45-64, though now that I can see ‘65’ barreling toward me like a bullet train racing through the French countryside, I want to expand the definition to 70 or even 75. But who am I kidding? I am not in the middle of anything, unless I live to be 120. And though my family name, Leblang, literally means ‘long life’ in German, men in my family tend to die young, a karmic joke or a reflection of God’s twisted humor. At least I have plenty of company. The US Census Bureau reports that the late 1950s formed the peak of the Baby Boom, that huge post-WW II generation that stretches from 1946-64. Growing up in the 1960s and early ‘70s, my classmates and I watched the older Boomers have all the fun we couldn’t. They streaked naked across campus, lit up their joints, protested against the Vietnam War, and grooved to the beat at Woodstock, while my prepubescent friends and I could only listen to the album, tittering at the dirty words and wondering what we missed. By the time I graduated from high school in the mid-1970s, Vietnam was over, a failed experiment. We tipped into the ‘me decade’ and my peers were right with them, focusing on getting high and then moving into high-powered careers, or at least a comfortable lifestyle. The biggest protest I saw was during my college days at Northwestern University, when the administration announced plans to raise our tuition to the staggering sum of $5,000 a year, or about $23,000 in today’s dollars. Years, and then decades went by while I wasn’t paying attention. I remember the “greed is good” 1980’s, when one of my students at Boston University’s School of Management cited Gordon Gecko, the Donald Trump-ish character from the movie “Wall Street” as her role model. While I cycled through a series of relatively low-paying jobs: special education teacher, career counselor, sign language interpreter, and semi-employed writer, my cohort were fast-tracking, moving up their corporate ladders, buying houses, having kids. Meanwhile, I wasn’t getting rich, but I did some meaningful work. And I knew that as the Stones sang back in the ‘60s, time was on my side. Fast-forward 30 years and it is those kids, the Millenials, born roughly between 1981 and 2000, who have become the new Yuppies with their Snapchat and Instagram accounts, their penchant for text messaging, and their inability to talk on the phone. So, where does that leave me, leave us? In 2016, the Pew Research Center cited Census Bureau projections, which predicted that Millenials born between 1981 and 1996 (Pew’s definition of the Millennial generation) would outnumber Boomers sometime in 2019, as more young immigrants come into the country and the oldest Boomers, now past 70, continue to die off. The survivors, I suspect, are determined to stay active, vital, to not get old in a society that both fears and denies the final act. My generation behaved, believed, and hoped that we could avoid the fate of our Depression-era parents, that we would be immortal. But Father Time gives each of us our allotted share, and more of those ‘60s trendsetters zaare checking out, no longer the focus of my teenage envy as they deal with the messiness of physical and mental decline, a reflection of what’s to come. I am a 60-something man watching the years pick up velocity like Newton’s apple, accelerating with the force of gravity and the weight of time. I feel that weight pressing on my chest and etching new lines into my face. By now, my cohort and I know that the river flows in only one direction. Today, if I squint my eyes, I can see the end -- though I don’t really want to look.