On Illness and Baseball

    The waiting room was large and full of hustle-bustle, but the cold winter evening crept in through the monstrous sliding glass doors and cast a pall of quiet desolation. Activity swirled around me, but I was alone with new and strange and scary thoughts. Ignorance. Confusion. It was an eternity before my parents and I were finally led into the examination room.
    White and small. Suffocating. Men and women in scrubs came and went, taking vital signs and notes. Asking questions. Who the fuck were they to be interrogating me, and who was I to be answering? No, this wasn't in the plan. I had no business being in an exam room in a hospital on Thursday night three days before Christmas. I should have been home eating dinner with my family or decorating the tree in our hallway or getting ready for school the next day. Anything banal. Anything but this.
    This wasn't in the plan. Someone had swapped the books. Time got screwed up in the process, too: it slogged along and then jerked ahead and then slowed to a crawl again. My body sat on a white cot and my eyes shifted from my parents to the nurses to the floor, but I was somewhere else. A dream of nightmarish uncertainty. A dream where fear grew like a black bubble in my chest, pushing up, making my head want to explode. But I was undeniably awake.
    The doctor returned. Three horrible words tumbled from his mouth, and everything changed.
    I've heard that usually in these situations it's the parents who cry, the child befuddled and blank. For me it was the opposite. Befuddled, yes, but stinging tears streamed uncontrollably from my eyes. The last thing I remember is dour- but dry-faced parents buttressing me from both sides, and then the night dissolved like the salt pouring down my young cheeks. I must have cried for a very long time.

    With the eventual return of clarity, the reality of the great struggle to come became clear. In the next six months, I would fight a battle for my life.
    And win.
    I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia on Thursday, December 22, 1988. The cancer was abnormally aggressive. After three months of rigorous treatment I relapsed, but received a bone marrow transplant from my sister in May of the next year. I have been in remission ever since.
    Human beauty is most visible during dark times: the love and support of family and neighbors, doctors and nurses and volunteers, teachers and schoolmates, was real and staggering. Humbling. Supernoval.
    I became especially close to my sister (her blood is identically mine) and my parents, who would sit by my bed until I fell asleep in the isolation unit on the yellow wing of the fourth floor. We're very open with each other, but occasionally, even now, a new piece of trivia about those trying days will be unearthed. I learned recently of this one:
    After the cancer came back, my prognosis became far grimmer. The leukemia seemed resistant to the chemo. Bone marrow transplants were at the time experimental and risky. Unbeknownst to me, the doctors had computed my chance of survival: 1 in 3. After reflecting upon this, my father, an avid baseball fan, arrived at a curious analogy. The best hitters hit .333. Wade Boggs, you know, guys like that. Now, you can't expect them to hit everything. On an arbitrary pitch, in an arbitrary game, the cards are stacked against it. The math says it'll probably be a strikeout or a pop-up. But if the Red Sox are down late in a big game with a runner on, you just know Boggs is going to get a hit. You just know he's going to come through in the clutch.
    I always sucked in Little League; I was afraid of the ball. But there was my little moment of slugging glory, if only in metaphor. I hit a two-out double in the ninth. We hit a two-out double in the ninth. And the crowd went wild.