Dr. Zadra was very pleased with my progress. "This is coming along beautifully!" he said as he gently moved my arm around while I sat shirtless on the exam table. Having not exercised for a while I had put on some weight and was a little self-conscious of my abdominal fat rolls.

"I don't mean to brag," he continued, "but I am God's gift to arthroscopic shoulder repair."

"You should put that on your business card," I said dryly.

"I just might." He made some notations in my file. "You can put your shirt back on." I was usually a T-Shirt guy, but now I wore button-downs because they didn't require me to reach over my head, which was still difficult.

"So, are you still experiencing acute pain?"

He asked the question offhandedly, without even looking up from the file, but unbeknownst to him I had spent an inordinate amount of time mentally preparing for this exact moment. Once a week, and sometimes twice, I had availed myself of Vicodin's delights. Each time, I increased the number of pills I was taking. The last time I had taken nine of them and consumed the better part of two bottles of wine.

Now, however, I was out of pills. But I didn't have to be. It all depended on my answer. A definitive yes would surely be rewarded with a refill of Vic while a no would be rewarded with not being saddled with a crippling chemical dependency.

It was a tough call.

Truly. It was.

After what must have seemed a bizarrely long pause I said, "Um, not really." This was the truth and I was proud of myself for having the fortitude to tell it. A part of me was still scheming to find a way to get more, but that was now impossible. It was a fait accompli.

"That's good," he said. I assumed that we had dispensed with that topic, but then he asked, "Is there any pain?"

I found myself hedging. "I mean... yeah... there's some, but..."

"I'll write you a prescription for more painkillers," he said, reaching for his pad.

"It's really not that bad," I protested half-heartedly.

"Well," he said, as he scribbled illegibly in blue ink, "it's better to have them and not need them, than to need them and not have them, right?"

I wanted to disagree, but his logic was flawless. "Uh, sure."

He tore off the top sheet and handed it to me. "Worse comes to worse, you can throw a hell of a party." He laughed.

One of the classic symptoms of someone with a substance abuse problem is that they hide what they're doing. Vodka bottles stashed in the back of a toilet tank, needles between the toes to conceal the puncture marks. Me? I was the exact opposite. I was completely open about what I was doing. Weirdly so. And everyone seemed to be cool with it. Weirdly so.

Samantha had suspected nothing before I come straight out and told her that I was mixing painkillers with alcohol. She registered disappointment, but not alarm. "Well, if that's what you feel you need..." And that mild rebuke was the the most negative reaction I got.

When I told Tammy about my Lost Weekend, she actually thought it was funny. Granted, I told the story in a funny way, but the details were objectively horrifying. And Tammy knew full well that this had become a regular thing. Yet it was all played off like it was completely normal.

What are you up to tonight, Aaron?

Hanging out with Vic.

Well, have fun you two!

I would also mention it in passing to coworkers and friends. Their reactions were mostly along the lines of:

If you've got any left over, I'll take them off your hands! Hahaha.

Looking back, I truly don't understand what people were thinking. Had someone told me that they were doing this I definitely would have said something. This was not theoretical, I had done that on a number of occasions. With Dead Russell, of course (that didn't work out that great; if it had he'd be known as Still Living Russell) but I also managed to convince two other substance abusers — a woman I was casually dating before I met Samantha and a teen actor who was clearly an alcoholic — to get treatment.

But I was almost uniformly enabled by the people around me. Including — astonishingly — my doctor who had for no discernible reason became, for all intents and purposes, a pill-pusher.

_____________________

A few days later, and out of the blue, Sensei Gilbert called me on my cell.

While I was high.

The smart thing to do was let it go to voicemail.

But I was high.

"Hello?" I said ill-advisedly.

"Hello, Pirate." It took a few moments to register that, Oh, right, I am The Pirate. "It's Gilbert." I wasn't used to him using his first name like that. Gilbert! That's a funny name!

"How are you, Sensei?" I concentrated hard on each syllable to hide the fact that I was fucking flying.

Sensei hadn't called to exchange pleasantries. "Why haven't you been to class?" he said gruffly.

The way he asked made it sound like a trick question. But I could only come up with the obvious answer. "I'm injured, Sensei."

"And?"

I wasn't anticipating a follow-up. "And... you were the one who injured me." When he said nothing I added, "Sensei."

He made an impatient noise, half sigh, half clearing of the throat. "I didn't ask who injured you, I asked why you haven't been to class?" In my drug-addled state, I was thoroughly confused. Although I'm pretty sure I would have been confused even if I had been stone cold sober.

"You tore my lib... uh...run" — it took me a few tries before I pronounced labrum correctly — "and, uh, snapped some, of my, er, tendons." At least I got tendons on the first try.

"I know," he said, his annoyance sharp enough to pierce my opiate haze. "So why aren't you coming in?" I was getting frustrated, too. What do you want from me, Old Man?!

"Because my left arm is out of—" I was going to say commission but the word had vanished from my vocabulary — "it's not working."

"How's your right arm?"

I looked at my right arm. It seemed OK.

"Fine, but I can't do the..." — the word techniques had also vanished, so I went with — "...stuff."

"We'll modify the stuff so you can. You want to be a Ninja, right?"

"Yes!" I agreed, pleased to have answered something correctly for a change.

"And you know what Ninjas do?"

"They... throw smoke bombs?"

"Adapt! Ninjas adapt. Understand?"

"I do, Sensei." And then I made the horrible mistake of trying to speak in Japanese. It was supposed to be Arigoto gozaimashita. I don't know what wound up coming out of my mouth, but I can assure you it wasn't that.

"So what are you on right now?" Hilariously, I could not understand how he figured out that I was on something. I thought I had been so smooth.

When I told him, he went on a long diatribe about Western Medicine. "First they charge you to cut you open and then they charge you to deal with the pain. They get you coming and going." I don't know that it was quite that cynical, but he had a point.

"OK, Pirate, you're gonna take all those pills..." That seemed like a strange thing for him to say. Maybe, I conjectured crazily, it's like when your father catches you with a cigarette, so he forces you to smoke the whole pack to teach you a lesson. Luckily, there was more to the sentence. "...and flush them down the toilet. Every last one."

"But Sensei... what about the... fish?"

"What about what fish?" I had read something somewhere about all the medications that people flushed down the toilet was finding its way to the ocean, which was unhealthy for sea creatures. Haddocks on Prozac.

"Flush it," he reiterated. "And if I don't see you at the dojo tomorrow, I'm going to track you down and drag you there myself. Got it?"

I showed up at the dojo, as ordered, and went back to training. Sensei Gilbert nodded at me, but did not reference our phone conversation from the previous night. I think it was because he didn't want to embarrass me, but it's also possible that he forgot. He talked to a lot of people and it was hard to keep track of what he had said to who, and who had said what to him. Which I'm not going to make fun for of him because, well, he's the deadliest man I've ever met and, also, increasingly the same thing happens to me.

Anyway.

Darian was tasked with helping me compensate for my damaged arm. He was, as he always was, excited for the challenge. What he found most interesting was that I was left-handed and therefore had to become proficient with my non-dominant arm. For a while it would be frustrating and awkward but the result, he believed, would be that my injury would in the end make me a better martial artist than I would have been had I never been injured in the first place.

And, yeah, that was a life lesson, too.

I guess that's the difference between being into the martial arts and, say, racquetball. While racketball is a fun sport and a excellent exercise, you don't hear a lot about racquetball wisdom. It's never, As the great racquetball champion Kane Waselenchuk once said, "It's all about the blue balls."

(Note: Kane Waselenchuk is a real name of a real racquetball champion — how could I not use it? —but the aphorism is mine because, as far as I can tell, there are no racquetball aphorisms. In fact, I went to a web site called Famous Racquetball Quotes and there were something like six quotes, but they weren't by racquetball players and they weren't about racquetball.)

I have to say, it was fascinating how quickly my mental state improved once I started moving again. This was buoyed by the fact that my physical state was rapidly improving, too. In Physical Therapy I was a god damned rock star. My PT — I can't remember his name, but I'm going to assume it's Chad — was besides himself.

"Check it out!" he'd crow to another PT — let's call him Chad, too — "Full mobility!"

"Seriously?" Chad would say, with more than a little envy. The woman he was training wasn't doing nearly as well — maybe sixty percent — and it made him feel inferior.

"Show him!" Chad said and I raised my arm all the way over my head. "Ha! Can you believe it! All this and he's in his forties!"

Chad looked at the woman — who was still in her early thirties — with something bordering on disdain. "It's time to step it up, Sheila," he said gravely. From that day on, Sheila hated me.

But I didn't hate Sheila. I didn't hate anyone. Sure, my career was still in the toilet and my wife was seeing someone — not Devin, he turned out to be a bore, but a computer programmer named Finn who she used to do improv with before we got married; I didn't think he was funny then and I definitely didn't think he was funny now — but big picture, I had with Sensei's help escaped the opioid trap and I felt like everything was going to be OK.

It did not last long.

_____________________

I answered the phone and both of my parents were on the line. I knew from experience that meant one of two things: Something great had happened, or something terrible had happened. And I could tell by their insistence that everything was fine, that it was the latter.

A genetic test had revealed that my mother had what was then known as the BRCA 1 mutation and is now known as "that thing that Angelina Jolie had." (I'm not saying that Angelina Jolie copied my mother, but I'm also not not saying it.) Without going into too much detail, it meant that my mother had a tremendous likelihood of getting aggressive forms of breast and ovarian cancer.

She had decided to have both of her ovaries out, which was apparently a fairly simple surgery and then a prophylactic double mastectomy, which was not. I felt a shudder ripple through my body at the very thought of it. A scalpel slicing into my mother's flesh. Cancer.

It was a chilling prospect, but she managed to keep her sense of humor. "Tell Tammy that she can have my breasts if she needs them," she said, which to me was a brilliantly dark joke. People always assumed that I got my sense of humor from my father, but Mom was no slouch, either.

"I think she's going to want bigger ones," my father quipped. (And as I would find out later, he wasn't wrong. Nobody is going to go through all the trouble of becoming a woman to wind up with an A cup.)

I offered to fly out to Pennsylvania to be there for the surgery and both of them insisted that it was unnecessary. Later, though, my father called me by himself and told me it would mean a lot to my mother if I was there. Even later, my mother called by herself and told me it would mean a lot to my father if I was there. I was going to go regardless, but it was adorable, how much they worried about each other.

When I got to the hospital it was clear that my father was a lot more worried than my mother was. He fidgeted and adjusted things — the TV, the bed, the placement of the floral arrangements and balloons — and kept pestering the nurses and orderlies with questions. The nervous energy of a man who needed to do something, when there was nothing he could do.

He had decided to stay the night with her in the hospital room, which was not the original plan. My father was notoriously noise-sensitive — this was why as a kid I never tried to sneak out at night; he could hear the sound of socks on carpet from the other side of the house — and there was no way he was going to get any sleep amongst the beeps and bumps and constant interruptions of a hospital ward. But he also couldn't stand the idea of being apart from her, so he hit on a solution: Scotch. A shot every few hours, he was confident, would get him through the night.

I hugged my mother. The last time I had seen her, she had been the very picture of vitality— she jogged, she lifted weights, she did something called Zumba — but now she seemed old and thin and frail. It was, I realize now, an illusion. She was just as strong as she had always been, but between the white gown with somber gray polka dots, the transparent IV drip in her arm and the buzzing fluorescent lights that gave her a sickly complexion, it looked like she was at death's door. Sooner or later, we all have these moments, seeing our parent's mortality, and this was mine.

I felt another shudder coming on, but suppressed it.

While Mom was in surgery, Dad and I went down to the cafeteria for lunch. Like most hospitals, the food was pretty bad, and wildly unhealthy, with entrees that featured bacon, corned beef, melted cheese and french fries. A cynic might conclude that the hospital was trying to drum up more business.

I ordered a cheeseburger under the mistaken assumption that it couldn't be that bad. (Lesson learned!) My father got a BLT, which looked OK, but he mostly just picked at the lettuce. I did my best to start conversations. Usually, that was not difficult; he was interested in a lot of things — cars, photography, classical music, theater — and we never lacked for subjects to discuss. Now, despite my efforts to draw him out, his attention kept wandering. Even his most favorite topic — Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, whom he revered as a god — didn't really interest him.

And who could blame him? He was worried that his wife was going to die. Maybe from the surgery, maybe from what the surgery would reveal.

This is dark, but one way of looking at marriage is that you're choosing whose face you want to see just before you die. That's the deal, right? Marriage isn't like leasing a car — three years with an option to buy — it's to the death. Like a duel. Which I guess is another way of looking at marriage.

But think about how weird this really is. It's an impossible decision to make with certainty at any age, but my father was twenty-one when he married my mother. Jesus, when I was twenty-one I was still eating Pop Tarts for breakfast and thought that Don't Worry, Be Happy was a pretty good song. And my mother was seventeen! Nobody knows anything at seventeen. At that age Hannah was in a black lipstick mopey Goth phase and Jana couldn't decide what to wear without changing outfits eight times. She certainly didn't know who she wanted to die with fifty years in the future.

Looked at another way, it would be like telling someone: I want you to buy a painting — just one — that, after looking at it every day — and exposing it to the elements — for fifty years, you will love as much (or more!) than you did when you bought it. And if you ever get tired of that painting, or even want to purchase a new one, you are a failure!

That's a lot of fucking pressure.

For my parents it literally was fifty years (and a few months) in the future, and in defiance of both logic and probability they still loved the paintings they chose. Before my mother was whisked away to the operating room, my father bent over and kissed her. And then she was wheeled down the hallway knowing that if something went wrong, his would be the last face she'd ever see.

(Well, technically, it would be the anesthetist's face, but let's not ruin the moment by being too literal, OK?)

Samantha and I had always joked: Nobody gets out of this marriage alive. But of course people get out of marriages alive all the time. Or they stay in the their marriage after the fire cooled, out of habit, out of convenience.

The truth is, it's not about getting out alive. It's about getting out in love.

But happily for my parents, that time had not yet come. The surgery was a complete success.

I was back in Los Angeles when my parents got the results of the biopsy. Both of of them were on the phone again, this time with great news. It turned out that she had her operation in the nick of time. She was DCIS, which despite what it sounds like is not a legal drama on NBC. It stands for Ductal Carcinoma in Situ, which is the earliest form of breast cancer, before it has a chance to spread, before it could kill her.

Whew!

When I told Samantha, she hugged me. I wept with relief, and so did she. I won't lie, it felt good being in her arms again, and I made it last as long as I could. I'm not saying it was worth all the pain my mother had endured, but still, a silver lining. Something to build on, maybe.

My mother had dodged a bullet, but the story wasn't over yet, because it was a heritable genetic problem. That meant I had a fifty/fifty chance of having the same mutation, which honestly wouldn't have been a big deal for me because its effects are not that serious for men. But if I had it, each of my girls would have a fifty/fifty chance of inheriting the gene, too.

Honestly, I couldn't bear to think about it and it was years before I finally got tested myself. But I'm going to tell you the results now — everything was fine — because I think I speak for all of us when I say we don't want to hear about cancer anymore.

Especially when we can talk about a much more fun topic, like gender reassignment surgery.