hand cancer

2020-06-20

content warning: gore

I was catching up with a friend of mine from middle school and high school, and we decided to grab breakfast the next morning, early, at six thirty. (This was normal: in high school we would sometimes grab breakfast at the Waffle House before going to school.)

The next morning came and we both slept in and missed our appointment. We planned to meet instead somewhere else. So I went to what I now think was the parking lot next to nth Street Cafe, a breakfast diner that I love and that closed down shortly after covid struck.

But the parking lot was closed. It was chained up. I was about to call my friend, J, again, but then somebody pulled up to the chains in a low pickup with a camper on the back. My coworker P jumped out and started carrying on about going camping. He told me to head into the camper and check out the sauna he had just installed.

Inside the camper was a small, wooden closet–a little bigger than an airplane bathroom–that was sealed and insulated and properly hot like a sauna. I stood in it for a minute in order to fully appreciate how hot it was, and then left.

Now the inside of the camper was huge. I think we had been transported to a gym of some sort. We were inside a large locker room and there was a bunch of people. I was talking to a woman I don’t know about the sauna and she decided to go try it out. She took off all her clothes and started walking naked through the locker room. I followed behind her, meaning to guard the door for her while she was in there; there were lots of young men hanging out in the locker room.

I noticed that there were two small, green sprouts growing from the heel of my hand, each one tipped with a tiny leaf that was just starting to unfurl. I tried pulling them out with my fingers but they were deeply rooted, and I knew I couldn’t just snap off at the stem if I wanted to get rid of them, or they would just grow back. I needed to get the roots.

I found a pair of tweezers and started pulling at the plants and they came out with their roots intact, huge spongy root systems that took out huge chunks of flesh from my hand when they came out. Soon my hand was splayed open and laid bare before me, and I was still picking out bits of root and bits of moss until there was basically nothing but bone.

tags: #cancer #waffle-house