Fiction Fix Nine

Kaiser | Dessert & Sudden Death
surgeon -- some colon!" Then Bob hopped out of the van with the energy of
a school kid dashing into a candy store.
What surprised me most about the dinner party was that all the big
city doctors and nurses trekked with their spouses to Hoboken on a hot July
Saturday night. What exactly did that say about Bob?
He had a special meal planned for our twenty-four guests: beef in a
black sauce, lobster in a white sauce. He arranged the sauces on black plates
to look like the Ying Yang symbol. But before the big sit-down feast at our
pink table, a huge spread of appetizers was laid out in the garden; bruschetta,
blue-cheese balls, a terrine of pâté, extra sharp provolone on Hoboken's
finest coal-fired brick-oven bread, homemade dumplings, shrimp cocktail
and, sitting in the center of that spread, a platter of stuffed derma.
Dr. Paty filled his plate with appetizers, then walked back inside to
talk to Bob, who was standing in front of the butcher block in the kitchen.
When the doctor forked some stuffed derma in his mouth Bob let him chew
a few times before saying, "Do you know what that is?"
"No," Dr. Paty replied, "but I like it!"
"It's stuffed derma," Bob answered. "Calves colon."
Dr. Paty's face scrunched. His chewing slowed down and he said,
"Oh, really?"
Then Bob cackled the loudest I’d ever heard and said, "Gotcha!"
Six months after the End of Cancer party, the cancer returned; it
had metastasized to Bob's liver. Bob put together a black three-ringed binder
of his medical records and research. There were seven tabbed sections. He
titled it:
The Iron Man of Colon Cancer
Research for Treatment
Liver/Smiver
This Cancer Must Die
He Fedex'd the book to his four primary doctors, expecting them to
read it and figure out how to save him. A week later Bob and I were sitting
across from Dr. Paty in his office. The three-ringed binder was on a shelf
next to the doctor’s desk. Next to it was the unopened magnum of champagne
we had arranged to have shipped from Napa Valley for Christmas. Dr.
Paty said, "We have to drink this together."
For the next hour I watched these two highly intelligent men talk
about how to attack Bob's cancer. They both were pointing and analyz-
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