Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Spring Pruning

47 Spring Pruning Two years ago calcium spiked in my blood, and Ken, my family doctor, sent me to a kidney specialist. I struggled through a decathlon of blood tests, at the end of which the man said, “You don’t have cancer, but you probably have a benign tumor in a parathyroid. You should see an endocrinologist .” Sometimes I think time a sculptor and people smooth hunks of stone, at least in their beginnings. As decades pass time batters the hunks, chiseling and riffling, hammering and prying, guttering the smoothness, carving personality and life but eventually shattering the stones so that they collapse into gravel, noticeable for a grainy moment but eventually vanishing, sinking beneath a succession of never-ending presents. I’d endured enough files and mallets, I decided. Three years earlier a surgeon had removed some nastiness from my colon. The next fall I tore the meniscus in my right knee, and the week before Thanksgiving, a doctor scoped my knee. Immediately ahead loomed a colonoscopy and a hernia operation, this last something I delayed for nine years. Halfheartedly I attempted to see an endocrinologist in Hartford. Getting an appointment was difficult, the only opening four months away, in midsummer when Vicki and I rusticated in Nova Scotia and I wrote about fields and woods, green places that quickened the mind and honed appetite for life, for me an enchanted season not a time autumnal with white coats and scalpels. On returning from Nova Scotia in October, I had my yearly physical. The calcium had dropped. Still I again investigated an appointment with the endocrinologist. “He doesn’t have an opening until February,” his secretary said. In January I went to Western Australia in hopes of writing a third book on Australia, the word trilogy appealing more to me than tumor. I returned to Connecticut on June 21. Four days later Vicki and I were in Bar Harbor waiting for the ferry to Canada. On August 25 48 | Dreamtime we came back to Storrs, arriving in the evening ten hours before my first class met. Perhaps a warning should be attached to descriptions of writing courses, something like, “The surgeon general has determined that writing is dangerous to your health.” Habits metastasize, even writing habits. Years of shaping pages can create the delusion that life itself can be shaped or at least its inconsecutiveness managed. “My mind to me a kingdom is,” Edward Dyer wrote at the end of the sixteenth century. The mind may be a kingdom, but it is not an empire, always capable of controlling the body. In December my throat became sore and I became hoarse, symptoms, I assumed, of a sinus infection, an ailment that bedevils me every spring. In April I saw a doctor at the University of Connecticut. In May, at the end of the semester, I planned to drive to Arkansas and spend a month at Dairy Hollow, a writers’ colony in Eureka Springs. The doctor prescribed a regiment of antibiotics assuring me that they would smooth my throat for the trip. The antibiotics did not work, and on May 7, the day I gave my final examination and three days before I was off to Arkansas, I went to Mansfield Family Practice . My throat ached, and the hoarseness was worse. Ken was out of the office, and I saw Nelson Walker, an old friend from years back when our children played on the same school teams. Nelson drew blood and felt my neck. My calcium had shot up to 12.1, normal ranging from 8.5 to 10.4, and instead of ranging between 15 and 65 my parathyroid hormone was 113, a sign of hyperparathroidism. Parathyroid glands are located in the neck, usually four of them. They make a hormone that regulates calcium in the body, keeping it from falling too low by leaching it from the bones. An overactive parathyroid makes an excessive amount of the hormone, causing blood calcium to rise and, among other matters, weakening bones. A single enlarged parathyroid was responsible for 80 percent of the cases of hyperparathyroidism, cancer causing less than one percent. That evening I drove to Willimantic and at Windham Hospital had an ultrasound on my neck. The next morning I returned to the hospital for blood tests. After the tests I drove home along the Mansfield City Road. Near Stearns Farm a small snapping turtle hunkered down in the middle of the road...