CityView Magazine

10 | April 2018 M M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S Life Behind the Earthen Dam BY BILL MCFADYEN M y primary care physician, who also served as best man at my late 20th century wedding, was engaging in retention of repeat business in that spring of 2012. "We see by our records that you have not had a physical in two years. We would like to schedule one." It was only four weeks until turkey season. My doctor and I always tried to swap intel of pre-season sightings and plans for early-morning ambushes. us, said I, "I accept the invitation for you to palpitate and prod where no other man has gone before." (Except the doctor in those two colonoscopies.) I had always suffered some conceit concerning my genetic blessings as it applied to my personal health. Beyond my 50th year, my blood pressure still never wavered much from 120 over 80. Cholesterol levels were so far from my purveyance that I did not know even where mine should fall, because they always had fallen right there, thus I paid it no mind. So the trip to the doctor that Tuesday morning was for me more social than medicinal. During even that most compromised of postures, I was peppering the good doctor with inquiries as to the whereabouts of Brer Turkey along the riverbank. Fully clothed and back in his private suite, my 25-year-old file representing theretofore near perfect health took up a measurable When you truly recognize the face of Death for the first time, your life's mistakes are immediately obvious to you. You regret having allowed yourself to make and repeat those mistakes. You know at once what you must do to correct the errant way should Death pass you by this time. percentage of the desktop but I had moved on to topics like the tangential pursuits of our children, the flowering spring, the welcome return of his pretty receptionist and the heirlooms strewn about the office shelves. Staying on task despite my ramblings, my friend glanced over his le shoulder at my chest x-ray. en he swiveled fully to look more closely. Without looking away from the screen, he pushed the old-timey doorbell under the shelf, summoning Nurse Michelle. Decades of medical conceit melted into the horror of certain death. e nickel-sized spot on my right lung shouted to me in a language that I knew intellectually I would one day have to decipher, but whose immediacy sent me from a bubbly boy to a man crying on his knees at the thought of three young children watching their dad waste and die. It was the low point of my life and it came like the crumbling of an earthen dam, flooding out everything that lay downstream. For the first time, I was in the Shadow of Death. Unlike the Psalmist, I was terrified. ose following three weeks were unlike any others I had known. Twenty-one days aer falling to my knees at the feet of my best man, I sat at my home computer with a drawstring suture closing the hole where the chest tube had been. Four nodules had become residents of Petri dishes in Durham, N.C. I prepared to re-enter the world of commercial real estate, apartment rentals and

• Cover