Everything Changes

shouldn’t have to attempt to articulate the sensations you may or may not have felt in your dick while you were pissing blood this morning.
    “Has this ever happened before?” he asks me.
    “No.”
    “Have you had any injuries recently, any trauma to your stomach or sides?”
    “No.”
    “Any pain during urination?”
    “No.”
    “Are you a smoker?”
    “No,” I say. “I mean, I was, back in college, but not anymore. I mean, not regularly. Sometimes, in bars, you know? When I’m having a few drinks.”
    “Would you characterize yourself as a heavy drinker?”
    “No. That is, um, sometimes. Rarely.” I have to remind myself that I’m not interviewing for a job.
    “Do you jog?”
    “No.”
    “Play any contact sports?”
    “No.”
    “Are you on any pain medication?”
    “Tylenol or Excedrin, sometimes, for headaches.”
    “Do you get a lot of headaches?”
    I’ve got one right now.
“Not really.”
    I wish he would just cut to the chase and look inside me already. I’ve already filled out enough forms in the waiting room to apply for a loan and, on the instructions of the pretty Hispanic physician’s assistant, disrobed and donned a gown made out of the thinnest cotton known to man. I’ve done my part; now let’s get on with it. Dr. Sanderson finally has me lie down on my side on the examination table and squeezes some clear gel onto my side and lower back. The gel is shockingly cold and my whole body clenches in surprise.
    “I know. It’s cold, isn’t it?” he says.
    “Yeah,” I say. Fucking sadist probably refrigerates it to watch his patients squirm.
    “What I’m doing is just a routine ultrasound, to get a look at your kidneys. Hematuria can be caused by any number of things, kidney stones, urinary tract infections, jarring physical activity. . . .” His voice trails off as he begins to rub the probe on me and a colorful image appears on the machine’s small television screen. After a minute or so, he tells me to roll over onto my other side. It would be nice if he’d give some indication as to what he thought about the first kidney, but apparently he likes to take in the whole show before offering his review, and while I could ask him, I’m suddenly superstitious about upsetting his ritual, so I roll over silently, the gown sticking to me uncomfortably where the gel remains. He spends another minute or so examining my left kidney and then says, “Lie flat on your back, please.”
    The left kidney seems to take even less time than the right, which is probably a good sign, indicating that there was simply nothing to see. Unless the left kidney was so obviously cancer infested, just riddled with throbbing tumors, that it only took an instant for him to know that I’m totally fucked, and now he’s having me lie on my back in case I pass out when he breaks the news to me. Or maybe the right kidney is the bad one, so all the left one required was a perfunctory check, because he’s already ascertained that I’m totally fucked. I lie on my back, and now I’m sweating, can feel my heart accelerating in my chest. Forget the cancer—I’m going to die of a massive coronary right here.
    He pulls up my gown like a perverted uncle and squirts some more of the cold gel all over my pelvis. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on nothing but moving the air in and out of my lungs. I do this for a while, until it occurs to me that he’s been working down there for quite some time, rubbing the probe just off my pelvic bone and clicking his mouse repeatedly. I open my eyes and am instantly terrified by the furrow in his brow and the way his eyebrows seem to be raised. “What are you doing?” I ask him.
    “I’m looking at your bladder,” he tells me distractedly as if he’s forgotten there was a person attached to the lower half he was examining.
    “Everything okay?”
    “Hmm,” he says.
    You never, under any circumstances, want to hear your doctor say “Hmm.” “Hmm” being medical jargon for “Holy shit.” “What is it?” I say.
    He turns the TV monitor toward me and I’m treated to the sight of the dark, quivering horror movie of my bladder wall. “There,” he says, using a mouse to draw a small circle on the screen. “Do you see that?”
    “What?”
    “This brighter spot over here.”
    “Yeah,” I say. “What is it?”
    Dr. Sanderson peers intently at the screen, nodding slowly. “I’m not sure,” he says, and just like that, everything changes.
    I sit