26 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
PERSONAL HISTORY
UNBUTTONED
Father and son.
BY DAVIDSEDARIS
ILLUSTRATION BY ROSS MACDONALD
I
was in Paris, waiting to undergo what
promised to be a pretty disgusting
medical procedure, when I got word
that my father was dying. The hospital
I was in had opened in 2000, but it
seemed newer. From our vantage point
in the second-floor radiology depart-
ment, Hugh and I could see the cafés
situated side by side in the modern, sun-
filled concourse below. “It’s like an air-
line terminal,” he observed.
“Yes,” I said. “Terminal Illness.”
Under different circumstances, I might
have described the place as cheerful. It
was the wrong word to use, though, when
I’d just had a CT scan and, in a few hours’
time, a doctor was scheduled to snake a
multipurpose device up the hole in my
penis. It was a sort of wire that took pic-
tures, squirted water, and had little teeth.
These would take bites out of my blad-
der, which would then be sent to a lab
and biopsied. So “cheerful”? Not so much,
at least for me.
I’d hoped to stick out in the radiol-
ogy wing, to be too youthful or hale to
fit in, but, looking around the waiting
area, I saw that everyone was roughly my
age, and either was bald or had gray hair.
If anybody belonged here, it was me.
The good news was that the urolo-
gist I met with later that afternoon was
loaded with personality. This made him
the opposite of one I’d seen earlier that
month, in London, when I’d gone in with
an unmistakable urinary-tract infection.
The pain was a giveaway, as was the blood
that came out when I peed. U.T.I.s are
common in women, but in men are usu-
ally a sign of something more serious.
The London urologist was sullen and
Scottish, the first to snake a multipur-
pose wire up my penis, but, sadly, not the
last. The only time he came to life was
when the camera started sending images
to the monitor he was looking at. “Ah,”
he trilled. “There’s your sphincter!”
I’ve always figured there was a rea-
son my insides were on the inside: so I
wouldn’t have to look at them. There-
fore I said something noncommittal, like
“Great!,” and went back to wishing that
I were dead, because it really hurts to
have a wire shoved up that narrow and
uninviting slit.
The urologist we’d come to see in Paris
looked over the results of the scan I’d just
undergone and announced that they re-
vealed nothing out of the ordinary. He
also studied the results of the tests I’d
had in London, including one for my
prostate. My eyes had been screwed shut
while it took place, but I’m fairly certain
it involved forcing a Golden Globe Award
up my ass. I didn’t cry or hit anyone,
though. Thus it annoyed me to see what
the English radiologist who’d performed
the test had written in the comment sec-
tion of his report: “Patient tolerated the
trans-rectal probe poorly.”
How dare he! I thought.
In the end, a quick prostate check and
the CT scan were the worst I had to
suffer that day in Paris. After taking ev-
erything into consideration, the French
doctor, who was young and handsome,
like someone who’d play a doctor on TV,
decided it wasn’t the right time to take
little bites out of my bladder. “Better to
give it another month,” he said, adding
that I shouldn’t worry too much. “Were
you younger, your urinary-tract infection
might not have been an issue, but at your
age it’s always best to be on the safe side.”
T
hat evening, Hugh and I took the
train back to London, and bought
next-day plane tickets for the U.S. My
father was by then in the intensive-care
unit, where doctors were draining great
quantities of ale-colored fluid from
his lungs. His heart was failing, and he
wasn’t expected to live much longer.
“This could be it,” my sister Lisa wrote
me in an e-mail.
The following morning, as we waited
to board our flight, I learned that he’d
