Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [13]
At last, he was looked over by a nurse and placed among the least urgent cases. When it was his turn to see a doctor, one of the visiting physicians, a tall white man, pressed his tongue down with a thin wooden stick and told him he saw a mass sitting on top of his larynx. The mass might be a tumor, the doctor explained through a translator, and if not removed could eventually block his airways and suffocate him. He wanted to do a biopsy right away, the doctor said.
“Can you take it out?” my uncle asked.
“We will only do the biopsy now,” explained the translator. “We’re taking a piece, not the whole thing, but when the entire mass is removed, you might lose your voice.”
Stunned, my uncle asked again, just to be sure, “Will I lose my voice today?”
“We’ll only do the biopsy today,” the doctor repeated.
Before my uncle could ask what a biopsy was, the translator, a Haitian doctor, added, “You have to let them cut a piece of the mass in your throat to examine it for cancer. It might be your only chance.”
During the biopsy, for which my uncle was given no more anesthesia than he might have gotten at the dentist’s office while having a tooth removed, he opened his mouth so wide that his face and neck throbbed. Lying there as the doctor clipped a piece of flesh from the back of his throat, he wished he could go back home and have one final conversation with his wife. He also wanted to preach one last sermon to his congregation, speak on the phone with his son and to my father in New York.
That evening, after the biopsy, my uncle lay in a hospital bed, unable to speak. Would his voice ever come back? He wrote that question on little pieces of paper the nurses gave him. They told him once more that this time it would, but probably not when he had the actual operation.
The next morning, the doctor explained through another translator that the tumor was cancerous. He needed a radical laryngectomy. His voice box would eventually have to be removed. Yes, he would most certainly lose his voice.
After the doctors left his bedside, my uncle became aware that someone in the hospital bed next to his had a small transistor radio, which was tuned to the same station where he’d first heard about the American doctors. The station had a charter studio on the hospital premises and the sound was coming through loud and clear. Over the airwaves, he heard among the lists of announcements about missing people and lost objects a voice saying, “Reverend Joseph Nosius, please come home. Your family is worried about you.”
My uncle was staring at the ceiling and wondering whether the doctors with their “biopsy” had done him more harm than good when he heard the announcer’s voice. It reminded him how important voices were. If you had one, you could use it to reach out to your loved ones, no matter how far away. Technological advances could help—the telephone, the radio, microphones, megaphones, amplifiers. But if you had no voice at all, he thought, you were simply left out of the constant hum of the world, the echo of conversations, the shouts and whispers of everyday life.
As he lay there, listening to the other patients talk to the doctors and nurses, to their family members and to each other, it occurred to him that after the operation, he would never again be able to preach a sermon or scream for help or laugh out loud at a funny joke. He also knew he had to get word to Tante Denise that he was alive.
Slowly he sat up and wrote a brief message on a piece of paper by his bedside and gave it to one of