to admit me to the hospital. I remember thinking, Well, at least a physical problem can be identified. Even at that point, cancer didn’t enter my mind.
Had I thought it might be cancer, I would not have gone to the ER at Garfield Medical Center, a hospital that serves a large, indigent, and underinsured immigrant population, filled with poorly educated and dubiously trained doctors. The surgeon assigned to my case, an idiot whose English was so accented I struggled to understand him—you know it must be pretty bad for me not to be able to understand a Chinese person’s accented English—and whose speech patterns and movements reminded me of a drunk, reviewed my X-rays and told me he saw nothing and that I would just have to wait for the obstruction to pass on its own while on bowel rest. The gastroenterologist assigned to my case, Dr. Tran, the only competent doctor there, didn’t agree with that approach; he was actually intent on discovering the nature of the obstruction. He ordered a CT scan with contrast for a better-quality image for 9:00 that evening, and planned to do a colonoscopy at 9:00 the next morning—July 7.
Josh and my sister came to see me after the CT scan, sneaking in long after visiting hours had ended in their fancy attire to tell me about the wedding, show me videos of the girls dancing, and let me know everyone was very concerned. Then Josh told me he loved me, told me to get some rest and that he’d see me in the morning, before they took me in for the colonoscopy. That was how the last day of my innocent old life ended.
The next morning I was taken to a room where Dr. Tran waited to do my colonoscopy. Just as I fell into that twilight state reserved for most colonoscopies, I saw Dr. Tran’s fuzzy face and heard him say, “I saw a mass in your colon on the CT scans.” Then I knew.
I woke from the anesthesia as I was being wheeled back into my room. Josh was waiting for me. The destroyed look on his face confirmed what I already knew. He was trying so hard to act calm and not cry, but the devastation was obvious. Then he said the words and showed me a copy of the colonoscopy report. “They found a mass that is suspicious for cancer…seventy-five to ninety-nine percent obstruction of your transverse colon.” Of course, Dr. Tran had said we wouldn’t know for certain until the biopsy results came back, but Josh and I knew that there was no need to wait for biopsy results, that words like “suspicious” are loaded in the medical world. We cried together in confusion, shock, horror, and fear.
Suddenly, my father and sister were there. They said nothing, but their faces reflected what I felt. My mother was at home taking care of the girls—oh my God, what would happen to my sweet, beautiful little girls? Then my brother, who had dropped everything upon hearing the news and driven the forty-five minutes to Monterey Park, was there at my bedside, hugging me and crying. I could see all the grays in his coarse, straight hair as he laid his head on me. I had stopped crying by then as I held his hand—I couldn’t remember ever holding his hand before. When had he grown up into a man and a father? When had I grown up into a woman and a mother? How was it that we were dealing with matters of life and death already—my life and death, to be precise? Here was the person who had taught me how to hold a baseball bat as he sought to transform me into the little brother he never had. And there was my sister, who had always taken care of me, whether it was driving me to buy clothes as a teenager or navigating us through the streets of some foreign place in our many travels together. And there was my father, who had always shamelessly admitted to all that I was his youngest and most treasured child, the only person who could legitimately contend with Josh over who loved me best. And of course, there was Josh, my lover, my best friend, my soul mate, the father of my children.
In that hospital room, with the exception of my mother and little girls, were the people I loved most in the world. It was a surreal scene, something