“You talkin’ to me?”
Great line. Greater scene. Greatest actor and/or movie. Robert DeNiro, in 1976’s Taxi Driver?
Unlikely, but not unreasonable.
It took me the rest of the 1970s and most of the ’80s to watch it in its entirety, catching it in several late-night snippets, glimpses and glances; in, after late nights out.
While shaving this past winter, I smirked, thinking of that sensational clip. We get odd mirror images, from random reflections on weird windows, when the sun’s just so. The guy staring back at me seems about my age; there’s some resemblance, but, he’s gotta be older, with way less hair that’s way whiter, has flab where I haven’t.
One early December day, when the sun’s shimmering as such, there he is again. Whoa! What’s with the ghastly growth on the collarbone? Great girth, and by God, it’s growing; at New Year’s, it’s downright ‘3D.’
Feigning indifference, with a casual wave of my foam-filled razor, I mouth-out to him, “Better get that thing checked out.” He glances up quickly, down again, quicker still. “Whatever,” I mutter. “While you’re at it, get some curtains,” as we turn away simultaneously, drawing our blinds at the same time.
Good thing that menacing mole, not unlike De Niro’s, is right under his nose.
Except it wasn’t.
A few weeks on, there’s an appointment to review some cholesterol-related blood work. Dr. D had announced one year earlier, “You’ll take Rosuvastatin for the rest of your life,” measuring my mortality much too matter-of-factly.
When I mentioned the mole, its bleeding, its having fallen off, she raises an eyebrow, finding another, 15 seconds later on my back, that I never would have.
“This one needs to go. It’ll be biopsied. We’ll book you here and in Barrie. There’s been some cancellations. Take whichever one comes first, maybe both.“
We were out on a March Monday, having chaperoned an acquaintance’s occasion with an oncologist, concurring that he was a wonderful man indeed, but that this was not a long-term relationship she should aspire to. This, especially so, after a litany of indeterminant results, in spite of a jack-hammer-like implement to extract a sample of bone. “Most painful experience ever,” she had said.
While quipping that “Dr. Coleman once gave me two needles in the roof of my mouth,” to nobody in particular, I took note that everybody was unimpressed. Typically, levity’s uplifting; on occasion, it is not.
Left alone afterwards, I enjoyed a foamy draught, at a diner’s hi-top table, off in the sun. A red flash on my phone signalled a couple of missed calls. Hmm, medical office, and a message from the medical officer herself; ever practical, matter-of-fact, and to the point. Now, however, there’s a wisp of alarm, an urgency, even a hint of halted speech.
The same message on the answering machine at home, I delete. Why add angst to an already ample plate?
I followed up with Dr. D the next day.
“Not a good diagnosis … a malignant melanoma … the skin cancer that can be fatal … but the pathology’s good, not extended to the margins of the excision … but insufficient tissue quantity from the biopsy to rule out any spread … not good news, we might need some scans,” said the doctor.
“We need to get you in right away.”
I gathered as much at the foamy draught the night before — two calls, calibre of the caller — the glance-at-the-stewardess test, for the turbulence’s true measure. Insiders in-the-know.
There’s an appointment to discuss the pathology. “If the melanoma’s in the lymph nodes ... we move on to oncology.”
I ask her, “Should I renew the Rosuvastatin?”
Levity again, that languishes a little less limply.
At about the same time, you may recall the Seattle medical student bringing the matter of a suspicious-looking mole on the back of Vancouver Canucks trainer Brian Hamilton’s neck, to his attention. She spotted it while sitting behind Vancouver’s bench. Hamilton’s doctor informed him, that if he had ignored the warning, four or five years on, he wouldn’t be here.
With any mention of moles, I always recall former Toronto Maple Leaf Darryl Sittler, arguably the team’s greatest, appearing seemingly suddenly between periods on a Hockey Night in Canada broadcast in the mid-’80s, as if it were a last-minute decision.
With an odd mix of hesitancy, yet, an earnestness, too, he spoke of his near-miss with melanoma, conveying cause for concern with conviction.
The Sittlers are committed advocates for cancer prevention. They’ve been hit hard; their message is hard-hitting. Darryl’s wife, Wendy, stricken with a cancer that might have been prevented, spoke emphatically as per the disease’s devastation, the ravages of chemo and radiation, imploring all to be aware, get tested.
They were seasonal customers, when, suddenly one summer, Wendy wasn’t.
Late in April, I was scheduled for a sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLN), a procedure that injects radioactive dye around the primary tumour, before a wide local excision removes it.
Gamma-ray scanning then maps the dye’s route along the lymphatic vessels to the nodes, three of which were to be excised for biopsy.
“Your melanoma’s a ‘T1B;’ the ‘T1’ pertains to the stage, and a modest thickness; the ‘B‘ flags potentially aggressive ulceration, versus that of an ‘A.’”
Prone on the operating table, I’m primed for dissection, introduced to a bevy of curt but friendly health-care practitioners who are ‘all-business’ to perform it. One of them instructs me to count down from 10, while I count up his colleagues.
Amidst the hustle and bustle of fluorescent lights flashing off of stainless steel that’s clanging, there are needles, tubes, tape and talking. I’ve a millisecond for melancholy, welling-up, wondering who’ll take care of my young yeller Lab, the Haze, when the anesthetic kicks in.
I numbered them at seven; there might’ve been eight.
It was a mole after all.
I awoke in the possession of two new tattoos, with zero input as per their design or destination. The one on my back’s rather rudimentary, a centipede with just 15 pairs of legs, but, the second one’s spectacular — the macabre grin of a jackal, emblazoned with staples, uncannily like incisors, blood dripping from them later that day! Why it’s hidden under my arm, no one did say.
Two weeks later, results from the SLN prove negative, which I take as a positive, given Dr. D’s upbeat mood. “The melanoma did not spread,” she enthuses, while removing two more moles, fixated on four others for future excision. “We got it.”
When I tentatively talk to a column on this experience, she’s encouraging, “skin aware,” as she so calls it, providing me a copy of Melanoma: Beyond the Basics. It’s riddled with nastiness and repercussion, “… immunotherapy … unleashing the body’s immune system to reject the melanoma … attacks other body tissues … potentially fatal side-effects … inflammation of the heart, the lungs; thyroid, the liver, the kidneys … Melanoma frequently spreads to the brain … Radiosurgery delivers radiation to the tumour … damage to normal brain cells…”
Nothing really riveting nor overly concerning.
I skip the sections on “experimental drugs” and “clinical trial participation.” They’re just ahead of “end-of-life care.”
This is a more challenging piece, reworked and rewritten, almost rescinded, for a nervousness as per non-qualification coming across as offensive and delinquent.
… I had stopped by the funeral home to pay my respects. It was the bright vibrant dress that first caught my eye. She smiled warmly in spite of the circumstances, flashing it warmly beneath her bald crown, as she happened upon people she hadn’t seen in decades, though they were from town.
There were tubes to her or from her, perhaps both, and a visible wound under some plastic sort of patch. Her approach was slow, weary, and burdened, but she hugged these friends a little longer and more firmly, perhaps wondering when she’d see them again …
Traces of trepidation remain with me, the melanoma could recur to migrate and meander, but, all-in, it’s been a brief 50-day bout. I’d been contemplating a trek with more turbulence, an enlightened insider’s piece, perhaps even a series, qualified by firsthand experience.
I’m the fifth such patient Dr. D is now treating. She senses my apprehension, leans forward and furrows her brow, “John, you’re qualified,” and I smile to myself as she reverts to her endearingly practical, matter-of-fact manner. “We’ll schedule full-body checks, every three months,” she asserts with a north-south glance, as I wince east-west.
And, for those 50 days, perhaps I am unqualified. If so, it’s due to Dr. D’s blessed and diligent, health-care-giving heart.
And, too, for Sittler’s long-ago segment, without which I might’ve dismissed this.
I don’t have his celebrity, neither his stature, nor his stage, but I hope for a similar effect, perhaps here, from this page. In Sittler’s own words: “Not knowing is not the answer. You don’t have to be Darryl Sittler to make a difference.”
There’s a lot of old movies I’d like to get to, but, Taxi Driver is gonna be first. Start to finish, no interruptions, all in one sitting.
“You talkin’ to me?”
“Yah, … I’m talkin’ to you.”
John Epstein is a former, 25-year Orillia business owner who left southern Ontario for the north years ago, and has never been back. He is now a freelance writer, whose column will appear monthly in OrilliaMatters. He can be reached at [email protected].
