Again found in the old Mac. This piece was titled "Cancer" by him.
I don't know the date written but sounds like much later than the time cancer was found in 2004.
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I had cancer. The doctors found it growing in my left lung. I called my doctor one day, finally, after running a fever for more than six days, and asked what I should do about it, as it wasn’t going away, and also I had a constant, hacking, cough, and so does one just ride out a fever like that or what? Doctor urbina told me to check myself into the hospital. K and I took the train into the city to st vincent’s hospital in the west village.
I was admitted immediately at the emergency room. I didn’t know when I went in that it would be a week before I came out again. I lay on a gurney in the emergency room for most of the afternoon. I had a fever so I remember it as being very dreamy with images drifting in and out; the old white guy across from me looking over the top of his sheet, the insane black man next to him, about my own age, who kept ranting, the various doctors, nurses, nurse’s aides, interns and hospital administrators who showed up and looked down at me, poking around and asking questions. I lay there listening to the never ending series of sounds which the patient monitoring machines make. The hums, the trills, the rhythmic pulses. I would soon get to know these sounds individually. I was constantly distracted and bothered by the sound of the iv drip, the sounds of the monitors of my vital signs which became insistent when something became unattached or I breathed too slowly, the morphine drip when I pressed the attached presser, not to mention the sounds of other patients and their machines.
Waiting in a wheelchair to get an x-ray one day I saw a young black man stretched out on a gurney unconscious or pretending to be, and his iv drip was beating a loud three-note sequence, and it went on and on and no one did anything about it. I wheelchaired up to the high desk where the middle-aged looking black women who arrange the x-ray procedures and said that guy’s iv isn’t working. It keeps beeping a malfunction. One of them went over to look at the guy, but then I was sent into the x-ray room and when I came out the guy was gone (the x-ray guy was the same guy who did the first x-ray in the emergency room, and he asked if I remember him which of course I did on account of his pronounced limp).
Finally, after lying there in the emergency room a guy came up to me and wheeled me away down a hallway and around a corner and parked me against a wall and said to wait to be x-rayed. At my feet, across the hall on the other side of the door to the x-ray room two white cops were non-chalantly interviewing a black man wearing cuffs who just as non-chalantly answered their questions and commented pithily on the ironic turns of fortune which befall us all. Gimpy ed, if that was his name, finally came out and wheeled me into the x-ray room where we did together a kind of formal dance called putting the patient in position and taking the patient’s picture. Merce Cunningham would have loved it, the soundless barefoot and white-sneakered movements, the smart clicks, bangs and sweeps made by ed’s manipulation of the slide. Back in the amergency room I was approached by interns who seemed so young, and I’m not even that old.
