A Million Inches Delicious

I learned to drive the same winter that my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer. This resulted in my first partially competent endeavors behind the wheel being trips back and forth from the hospital, my dad in the passenger seat either growling in agony at a rebellious bladder or silently stewing over a poorly positioned catheter. It also meant that if I took a left turn too quickly, stepped on the brakes too hard, or drove over a speed bump too fast, I was not only labeled as an irresponsible driver, but also as one more force in the campaign against my father’s health and well-being. This volatile chauffeur service went on for over a month—communication between my dad and I peeled down to sparse speculation about the future punctuated by barked rebukes on my driving—until the morning I drove my dad to his first procedure for radium seed implants.

Radium seed implants are a fairly new and somewhat self-explanatory treatment for prostate cancer which involve shooting hundreds of tiny irradiated pellets into the prostate gland, thereby delivering high doses of radiation at the cancer site without risking exposure to nearby organs. Even with the fact of having radioactive material shot directly into his asshole, this was the treatment option that appealed most to my dad, and as we sat in the car that winter morning, the windows slowly fogging over with the surrounding cold, I could see the reality of it all slowly carving its way through my father’s forehead.

“Ben,” he said suddenly, “I need you to do something for me. And I need you to say yes.” His voice was serious and straightforward, two adjectives rarely ever used on my dad, and it flooded my imagination with thoughts of wills, heirlooms, and my weeping family. “Yeah, dad, sure. Anything.” “Good,” he said, and pulled out of his briefcase a large purple felt tip marker. He looked at me, his brown eyes steady and sure beneath his fissured forehead. “Now, you know what they’re going to do to me in there,” he gestured to the automatic doors of the hospital, “Well, I’m going to be under anesthesia while they’re at it, and I want to make sure that they’re kind to me while I’m out. That’s where I need your help.” He put the marker in my hand. “I need you to write them a message.”

A quick jump to present day, where the only things that exist from my dad’s nine-month ordeal with cancer are an unused pack of catheters, a reignited faith within my parents’ hearts, and a 4×6 photo of my dad straddled over the passenger seat of my car, proudly displaying the disclaimer I had scrawled across his butt cheeks in giant block letters, two on the left, three on the right: “EZ PLZ”