A Portrait of Pain

Metastasis

Now we have established that I have indeed witnessed my fair share of unusual medical cases, I feel we can get to the account that is to be the focus of this column. Is a column what this is? It feels like something more. An epitaph, perhaps. Since a shadow, ironically enough, has taken ahold of me. At 31 I, Dr. Torres, one of the most renowned oncologists in the world (and one of the most modest, as you can tell), have become the prey of my own profession's subject wrath. By 32 I may be a cadaver.

It is lung cancer. Terminal. This is the first time I'm issuing a statement regarding this out to the world. Before this epitaph-column is published — if, indeed, I ever finish writing it — only my wife, dog, mother, and a handful of doctor colleagues know I have it. I suppose I always have had a flair for the dramatic.

However, I will try to be as straightforward in my approach towards the telling of the most bizarre incident that has troubled me for the past two years. I want this true story out in the world in a factually correct form.

I was back in the countryside I grew up in to bury my father. It's a small, swampy place, marked today as a cancer cluster red zone. Probably since it is in a tropical and asbestos prone region.

Anyway, after my father's funeral, a couple approached. Or, I assumed they were a couple. They were actually doctors. They ascertained themselves — Dr. Grant and Dr. Grace — and their problem: a five-year-old child of the countryside had something inside his skull. They ran their own independent surgery ward and wanted me to assist them in identifying the something.

I was immediately taken back to the time Dr. Julian passed away a day after treating on the manic tumorless man. But the Grant and Grace arguments were persuasive, and a child's life was on the line, so I agreed to help them to the best of my abilities while I was still in the countryside.

The child had hardly more flesh on him than a skeleton. His eyes were quite gray.

Cut to thirty hours later, I was sawing his cranium when the "tumor" launched out at me, a ball of whipping tentacles. I very professionally swiped my scalpel so that the assailant burrowed into one of the eyesockets of the one of the couple. It burrowed all the way in while Dr. Grant screamed and screamed, and his partner and I watched speechless, until a tentacle leaped out of the man's other socket and took Dr. Grace down too. They bled red tears and died.

I was paralyzed, which I hope is understandable.

I forgot how to breathe when the living tumors turned towards me — insofar as I could tell, since they appeared to have no eyes. They looked like molluscs — oyster juice to be specific, but reciprocatively I was to be their meal.

The tumors merged together, growing in size as tumors do, making a horrible squelching noise. As a surgeon I was accustomed to unflattering sights. But, staring wide-eyed at the malignant tumor, I felt like watching the treatment of my first vitiligo patient: puncturing bloody holes into melanin-deficit patches of not-skin.

I felt I would soon join my father in the grave, when the child we had tranquilized before the surgery rose calmly to his feet and lowered his arm in slow motion. The occipital section of his cranium was uncovered — blood bubbled there like lava, drenching bone and hair. The tumor latched to his arm and squelched up, squirming into the hole in the child's head.

His eyes became a darker shade of gray immediately. I could see, horrified, the alien tumor wiggling its way to his retina.

The child walked to me and wrenched the scalpel from my frozen fingers. He brought a finger up to his thin lips, and smiled, and collapsed as he slit his own throat.

I stood there for an incalculable amount of time before I gathered myself and dashed out of the surgery ward. In hindsight, that was stupid. Had the bodies of Dr. Grant and Dr. Grace and the child been discovered by the cops, they would surely have made note of their slit throats and asked around and had me arrested. Fortunately, I was told by my grieving mother at dawn, while I lay in her bed in a cold sweat, that a surgery ward two ranches down had burnt to the ground. The cops later must only have found incinerated bodies, not slaughtered ones. I was in the clear.

I didn't feel like I was in the clear, though. How would any intelligent mind react to having seen the ineffable? Probably by ignoring that it'd seen what it saw. So I carried on with my job back in Cambridge, and I built my name and my reputation, and I dealt with the nightmares after my own fashion.

Now I write this. And I dab my forehead with an arm the hairs of which stand erect.

I'm still in a state of vacillation. I don't know whether publishing this will mean the end of my career, if somebody agrees to publish it in the first place, because who would want a madman to operate on them, a madman with a degree from Harvard or no? Does it truly matter? I will be decadent by month's end either way. I can already feel my alveoli vasodilating most atypically. I can feel the cancer traveling, corrupting, poisoning my cells.

Maybe there will be articles on me, too. Studies may be conducted. Summits might be held. And, maybe, I will vanish off the face of the Earth before they can find an answer too. Like old Joline Campbell . . . gone.