Conversation with My Wife (215)
“So, I guess we’re going out together.”
CAUTION: spoilers for those who have not yet binged “Squid Game”; both of you might want to skip this?
We were watching the HBO movie “Wit,” starring Emma Thompson. (Wonderful movie! Have a bunch of tissues handy, especially if you have a parent or loved one who died of metastatic ovarian cancer. Or you have a heartbeat.) The plot revolves around the character of Dr. Vivian Bearing, diagnosed with cancer, who agrees to a radical new treatment that will be brutal, but “good for research.” Before long she realizes that a lot of the horrible symptoms she’s going through in the hospital aren’t because of her cancer, it’s because of the cancer treatment — and the hospital researchers see her as a test subject, not a person.¹
It was not a movie that made me feel good about the American medical system or the way it treats patients. Not that I was all that enthusiastic anyway, having watched a parent die of a variety of ailments brought about by a failing heart and diabetes while being subjected to endless tests because a bunch of specialists didn’t want him messing up their success statistics.³
ME: Okay, if I get cancer, screw it, I’m just going to go straight to palliative care. Not passing Go, not collecting two hundred hours of pain to help some hospital’s survival stats.
DEB: So… if I get cancer, I get to just say screw it, I’m not treating it?
(silence in the living room)
ME: Okay, so, I guess we’ll talk about it when it happens?
DEB: (leans into me and pats my leg)
And then we watched Squid Game on Netflix.⁴ And in one of the games, players pair up, thinking they will be working with a partner to win together, only to find that only one of the partners will survive. Including a husband and wife. The husband survives—we’re not shown how—and then kills himself after the game is over.
ME: So… if it comes to that, we just hang out until the timer expires, tell the guards we tied, and then let them shoot us both. Right?
DEB: That’s what we do. (kiss)
We’ve discussed this before. Sort of.
Although we might rush the guards. I mean, we’re going to go anyway, why not take somebody with us?
¹With exceptions. Tre, the nurse Susie, played by Audra McDonald,² reminded me so much of you—voice, appearance, her wonderful smile. The way she took care of Vivian at the end, especially touches like putting lotion on Vivian because the treatments were drying out Vivian’s skin, were the kinds of things I can see you doing for people. Even people like Vivian, who were—sorry, Dr. Bearing—basically PITAs.
²Who was also, along with Emma Thompson (Mrs. Potts), in the 2017 Beauty and the Beast as Madame Garderobe. Don’t you love IMDB?
³Dad (Deb’s dad) finally got asked by his family doctor, “Would you like to just go home, Bob?” “Yes, please, yes I would.” “Then let’s get you home.” Dad spent the rest of his time at home, other than a couple weeks under hospice care.
⁴Yes, we got to it late. Nothing I read about the show made me want to see it, other than the Korean location (I was stationed in Seoul in 1988—I recognized one of the neighborhoods because Namsan Tower showed in the background). But a friend of ours told us we just had to see it, and she’s right! Not just a horror show with bunches of blood, we’ve gotten kind of fond of some of the characters. Not really fond, because the casualty rate is high, so it’s best not to get overly attached to anybody.
Copyright ©2021 by Jack Herlocker. All rights reserved, and if you rip this off you may find yourself in an unmarked van with gas coming out the vents as you are taken to a mysterious island…
