Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [369]
A couple of weeks before “The Island” appeared in the April 27 issue, Cheever noticed that his beloved old dog, Edgar, was becoming very ill, and a few days later his own health took an abrupt turn for the worse. Finding it almost impossible to urinate, and passing blood when he did, Cheever was admitted to the hospital on April 17 “in acute distress.” At first it didn't seem terribly serious: his prostate was enlarged again, and the bleeding was attributed to incipient kidney stones (“I had been hoping for some restraint on my erotic ardor and this seemed to serve,” Cheever noted). However, when lab reports showed “irregularities” in his urine, Cheever was referred to a Phelps urologist named Marvin Schulman, who relieved the patient's immediate distress with a procedure that must have been intensely painful: a catheter with a spring-loaded blade was inserted into Cheever's ureter and then withdrawn, slicing through scar tissue and thus relieving the obstruction. “I felt like a Calla Liley [sic] with my stamen in the Waring Mixer,” Cheever wrote Federico. Once he'd healed a little, though, he felt a certain gratitude toward the urologist; also, he might have figured that—given what had passed between them—it would be wise to endear himself: “[T]hank you for having cleared up my plumbing and for having left the relationship open-ended,” he wrote Schulman that summer. “It is a pleasure to know that while my urinary tract has an understanding friend in Ossining, so also does the rest of me. In August I am one of those men who can be seen eating their fried potatoes alone in the Brasserie Suisse and I will call to see if you might join me.”
Soon Cheever's pain and bleeding resumed, worse than ever, though he was determined to keep his good humor (“I take this all as a big joke since there really isn't anything else to be done”). At the beginning of July, Updike and his second wife came to Cedar Lane for lunch, and while Cheever had no appetite and looked “yellowish,” he was a convivial host and even insisted on showing his guests the Croton Dam, where Updike's wife took a picture of the two writers. Looking at the photograph afterward, Updike was struck by how “visibly in pain” Cheever seemed: “Yet such was his vitality, and the dazzling veil of verbal fun he spun around himself,* that only the photograph made me realize how bravely ill he was that day.” He was, in fact, only days away from a major crisis. On July 8, Cheever suffered another seizure and was rushed to the Phelps emergency room, where X-rays revealed a walnut-sized tumor on his right kidney. On July 14, the kidney was removed by Dr. Schulman, who declared the operation a success. As Cheever wrote in his journal, “I am told by the surgeon that the malignity of my cancer was far from fatal and that the cancer was defenestrated very early in its career.” Ben also spoke with the surgeon, and was also told that all would be well.
So Schulman might have thought at the time. Two days later, a pathology lab report indicated “transitional cell carcinoma,” a generally low-grade malignancy that tends to be treated with electrodesiccation, in which recurring bits of cancerous tissue are burned away with electric current. In other words, the report was relatively good news. That same day, however—-July 16—a second report was submitted to Dr. Schulman, indicating the presence of a deadly, “poorly differentiated” hypernephroma (common to heavy smokers) that spreads rapidly and requires immediate attention. Schulman sent both reports to Dr. Mutter, stapling a little note to the second one: “Attached is the revised report on John Cheever. Please destroy previous report and replace it with this one. Thank you.”
Meanwhile Schulman stuck to the story offered by the first report (which incidentally remained in the file). “I returned from the hospital only yesterday morning and feel exactly like a