A man walks into a party. Guests are milling around. There is a low hum from the combined conversations of the partygoers, and over it can be heard some faint music. I think it is “Songbird” by Kenny G. Yah, it is. I’d know that song anywhere. Remember 1987? You couldn’t get away from it. Geez… you’d be in the supermarket buying pork chops, or bleach, and there it was. It was enough to make you want to chew your own foot off.
Anyway, the man walks over to a group that has gathered around a table with some nibbles on it. The hostess, a woman named Sharon, greets him warmly, “Glad you could make it Steve.” He responds, “Parking is a nightmare around here…so many cars…you have to squeeze into the tiniest spaces.” One of the other guests, a man named Larry, takes a bite of his canapé and says smugly, “well it’s not brain surgery.” Steve extends his hand to Larry and says, “Hi. I’m Steve. Are you a doctor or something?” Larry shakes Steve’s hand and says condescendingly, “brain surgeon.” Larry is a bit of a prick.
Sharon directs Steve’s attention to two other people standing at the nibbles table, “I’d like you to meet Brian and Susan, my friends from college.” Steve, still stinging from Larry’s put down, fumbles to find words, shakes Brian’s hand, and says, “Hi…and what do you do?” Brian replies,“I’m an accountant.” It’s the end of March, so Steve, confident in his small-talk, responds with a smile and, “oh you must be really busy this time of year with April 15th just around the corner.” Brian nods in agreement. “Yah, 18 hour days and I’ve had to hire extra staff…”
Larry, who has been sipping a glass of rosé, interrupts, “still, it’s not brain surgery.”
Steve is really starting to hate Larry. He turns to Susan, saying, “and you…what do you do?” She sets down her piña colada, and says, “I work for a non-profit that helps immigrants find employment and housing,” to which Steve responds, “oh wow, that is such important work in today’s climate with you-know-who in the White House.”
Larry leans over. “It’s not like it’s brain surgery.”
Just then, a tall, thin, disheveled man walks in, late to the party. He has horn-rimmed glasses and greasy hair. A plastic pocket protector stuffed with pens and a half-eaten Snickers bar protrudes from his shirt, one side of which has come un-tucked. Sharon smiles and greets him warmly, “Oh Jack, they keep you late at JPL tonight?” Sensing Steve is getting fed up with Larry, she maneuvers Jack between them and says, Have you met Larry?”
Jack smiles and extends his hand. “Hello Larry. Nice to meet you.”
Larry shakes Jack’s hand and asks him, “So Jack, how do you earn a living?”
Jack scoops up some cheese dip with a 5-grain cracker from the nibbles table and answers, “I’m a mathematician. I work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena helping them calculate fuel to burn ratios on liftoff for their rockets. It’s tough work because you have to get the numbers just right – with millions of dollars at stake, there’s no room for error. It can be pretty stressful. And what do you do?”
Larry grins sheepishly and says, “Well, I don’t like to boast, but I’m a brain surgeon at Cedars-Sinai.”
Jack looks him up and down, takes a bite of his cracker, and says, “Brain surgery…It’s not exactly rocket science, is it?”
On December 26, 2006, I had brain surgery at Cedars-Sinai in West Hollywood, although my neurologist was named Seymour, not Larry. The surgery was diagnostic. Lesions had formed on my brain and were detected by an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine, and the only way to determine what they were was to go in, remove some, and send it to a lab for testing.
As a result of that surgery, the following January, Seymour, or Dr. Young as I call him, diagnosed me with PML (Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy), a rare neurological disease I developed as a consequence of HIV/AIDS that stops the brain being able to communicate with different parts of the body depending on where the lesions form (in my case, my noggin can’t talk to the left side of my body). There is no cure for PML, and it is fatal in 90% of cases within six months of diagnosis. If that weren’t bad enough, symptoms can be treated, but there is no treatment for the disease itself.
I was 40 when Dr. Young delivered the news. He told me not to expect to see 41.
I will be turning 60 a month from now. Dr. Young now practices medicine here in Palm Springs. I’d like to think he followed me from LA, but the truth is that he is gay and along with his husband they wanted to move to Palm Springs because that is what our people do (unless they’re on the east coast, in which case they move to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware).
For the last nineteen years – what I call my second act – I have seen Dr. Young every six months. He calls me his favorite patient. I think that’s just because I had the good sense not to go and die on him. And keep this in mind: when a man (or woman) has had their hands inside your skull, you let them call you anything that they damn well please – they could call you Gertrude and for your part you do not object.
Our biannual appointments are an interesting affair. They resemble the mingling Steve and Jack were up to at the party mentioned above. We talk, often at great lengths about my Chihuahua Gordon – and this is actually an examination, because he is listening (and recording) my speech patterns, command of language and vocabulary, and even assessing my cognitive processing by asking me questions like “how many years has it been since your father died…what is that in months?” He will hand me items like a pen to see how I reach for and take it, and walk around the room while his clinical assistant watches my eye and head movement as I follow him from my seated position. Sometimes we play “patty cake” (tells him about my reflexes and my hand-eye coordination) and sometimes he goes all goofy, pretending to be lovey-dovey and holding hands with me (he’s evaluating my grip).
The whole thing feels less like a doctor’s appointment and more like a cocktail party without cocktails. This is because Dr. Young (at left) knows what he is looking for and has, over these last nineteen years, always been concerned most with my quality of life and whether I am “living,” or merely existing. The bottom line is this: neurologists (brain surgeons) are really smart and I probably wouldn’t be alive today writing a blog post for you good people this morning without one. They tend to be, and Dr. Young is, a little cocky (like our friend Larry), but they deserve to be.
And I can tell you that at our appointment last week, during which we discussed if Gordon suffers from Napoleon syndrome because of his size, Dr. Young said not only had I spent the last two decades beating the odds of a disease with a 90% fatality rate, but that I was doing so with style and with grace, not only meeting but exceeding every benchmark he uses to assess my condition.
After the year I’ve had health-wise, that was really good to hear.
