Hast thou considered my servant Job?

“And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?”

The Book of Job 7,8 King James Version

“What you’ll have to do now is ride the rap, as they say. It’s all anybody has to do.”

Raylan Givens in Riding The Rap by Elmore Leonard

Something made me think of Job the other day. Oh yeah, it was these.

I was sitting on the toilet in the dark at four in the morning shitting dark diarrhea that seemed to be equal parts blood and battery acid.

(Oh relax, its not like I’ve run on with an endless flow of diarrhea stories. Neither have I dropped tales of constipation into this narrative like little stones rattling down a drainpipe. Gird up thy loins and read on…

…Wait seriously?! Not one of you knows how to gird your loins? OMG!

Girded? Good, let’s go.

I reached for a dude wipe ( a gift from my mom - she was the first to wipe my ass and still considers herself an expert on the subject). Suddenly I was not alone - Job - yes that Job - was there, sitting in ashes and covered in boils from head to foot. He scraped at them disconsolately with a potsherd while I dabbed at my sore ass with my Dude wipe.

Don’t remember the details of Job’s story? Wondering why the two of us should be in my bathroom commiserating in the small hours. Well stick with me here because The Book of Job is fascinating and one of the great “wait what?!” moments in the bible.

Just pop back up and consider the quote above from the beginning of the tale. The context is a meeting God has called in heaven in which “the sons of God came to present themselves before the lord, and Satan came also among them.” Yep Satan is there, but here still one of the guys, welcomed, even required to be in God’s court.

Their initial exchange is delicious. First God asks Satan what he has been up to even though he knows exactly what he has been up to - that’s one of his superpowers. Nope he’s just asking in order to remind Satan that he is subservient and is required to make an account of himself.

Satan does so, but check out his hilarious answer/non answer -

“From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

Its something between a fuck you and the response of a rebellious teenager’s “out” when asked by a parent where he is gong.

Never mind, the Lord lets it slide and asks if Satan has considered Job, “a perfect and upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil”

(Now you are beginning to see why I might identify with Job.)

Here it gets even stranger because you quickly realize that Satan is the one in control. God, acting like an insecure Trump, is touting the devotion of one of his supporters “eh eh?”

Satan doesn’t miss a beat, says well sure Job worships you - you have protected him, blessed him with a large family and allowed him to grow rich - take that away and you will seen his enthusiasm for you disappear - he will in fact “curse thee to thy face.”

God, inexplicably takes the bait. I mean he doesn’t have anything to prove - maybe he is just bored. He tells Satan, have at it - “all that he hath is in thy power.” The only restriction he puts on Satan at this point is not to touch Job himself.

Satan, unleashed, has a field day. Before long messengers start arriving telling Job that enemies have descended upon his herds, killed his servants and stolen all of his cattle, fires consumed all of his sheep and on and on. Job’s wealth disappears in an instant.

But Satan isn’t done - You said I could do anything I wanted if I didn’t touch Job’s person. Job had seven sons and three daughters. They were a close family and often got together to feast and play pickleball. They had gathered for one of those feasts.

“And behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men and they are dead.” The young women were dead too btw.

Job, of course knows nothing about the cosmic bet being played out. He is aware, of course that God is all powerful but in his distress and profound grief his devotion is unshaken. “The Lord gave, and hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Another celestial meeting and God, delighted by the turn of events, taunts Satan. Did you happen to notice while you were walking up and down on the earth that Job, even though you had me destroy him without cause is the same old faithful goodun he always was?

For Satan this is too good to be true - he confidently casts his line in the water again: Ah well, sure - family, wealth, a man would give that up but “touch his bone and flesh and he will curse you to your face.”

God - “Behold he is in thine hand; but save his life.”

Quick summary - God, to prove a point or out of boredom, directs one of his angels to torture his most faithful servant to within an inch of his life.

Satan does not disappoint. And that is how Job came to be sitting on a pile of ashes in my bathroom covered with boils “from the sole of his foot unto his crown.”

Did our hero finally succumb and curse God for his misfortunes? He did not.

But he suffered and struggled to understand what had befallen him. Friends arrive to mourn with Job. His grief is so profound, his misery so abject that the request he longs for God to grant is the one measure God had forbidden Satan - Job wants God to destroy him. Lacking this one mercy, he just wants to understand why, having lived a blameless life he should be so afflicted.

And guess what? Job gets his meeting with God. You will not be surprised to learn that he quickly regrets it.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind. and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”

Oh shit.

It goes downhill from there. God bursts forth in a performance that is like that of the Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz before Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal a Trumpian fraudster.

“Where was thou when I laid the foundation of the earth” and

“Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?”

No sir I canst.

God goes on for pages like this, extolling his powers of creation and ability to humble anyone who looks at him wrong. Job quickly regrets asking for the meeting and tries to back out.

“Behold I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay my hand upon my mouth”

More ranting, lots more ranting and finally God reckons he has proved his point and relents. He doesn’t deign to give Job an explanation but he does restore his health. He not only restores Job’s wealth - he doubles it. And he not only lets Job have seven new sons and three new daughters - all of them super hot - but has him live 140 years so he can enjoy “his sons, and his son’s sons, even four generations.”

Not bad, but can we spare a moment of silence for the collateral damage in this story. There are of course all of Job’s previous workers and servants who died during God/Satan’s first orgy of violence. Still dead and gone. And Job’s first three daughters and seven sons. Dead and dead. Ah well, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

It’s starting to make sense when my subconscious summoned Job to join me in the darkened bathroom. I too had recently experienced a stark reversal of fortunes.

I was never rich like Job, of course. But that isn’t God’s fault - I’ve always been one manic episode away from debt that would hobble me for years.

But things were looking good. Just a few years before I had started an adventure with a new romantic partner. We had started a business together, an ecotour company operating in The Ten Thousand Island Wilderness Preserve. And I had launched my nonprofit The Dolphin Study which was the culmination of years of work.

It was the first time either Robyn or I had worked for ourselves and the first year was difficult but rewarding. It was difficult finding a boat during the pandemic, it was difficult finding a place to put that boat, it was difficult to maintain the boat, it was difficult finding a place to pick up prospective passengers, it was difficult navigating all of the regulations and necessities of opening a business. It was difficult competing in a crowded field with no business history.

But after a year we were hitting our stride, bookings were filling up, 5-star ratings were accumulating. We were nailing it. We realized that in order to be viable long term we need a bigger boat, the ability to take out more than six passengers at a time.

Finding a boat during the pandemic that could obtain a coast guard C.O.I. (Certificate of Inspection - a requirement to carry more than six passengers) and doing it while running trips seven days a week seemed an impossibility. The companies that made such boats would maybe consider starting to build us one in two years. But by some miracle Robyn found a used one and after several stressful weeks a dear friend helped us with the financing, and we drove to Georgia and bought it. (Every step of the way, dear friends or family members played crucial roles in helping us succeed.) A shit ton of work was ahead of us, but we knew we had crossed a crucial threshold. We now had the necessary components to ensure the business would thrive.

We fucking did it!

I mentioned all of this was stressful. And so in December when I started have digestive problems - cramping mostly, diarrhea I chalked it up to stress. We self diagnosed gastritis and altered my diet to make it as innocuous as possible - think mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables. For a while I even quit all alcohol and coffee intake. That is a sign that the discomfort was such that I was starting to take this seriously. But it just kept getting worse - nights of cramps and cold sweats when in my distress I lied down on the bathroom floor to get some relief from the cool tiles.

Yeah I know.

But you know the morning would come and the horrors of the night would fade and we would have another trip to conduct. We were finally making a little money, more than enough to just stay afloat. Financially things were still day to day though and now that season had begun it was the time to put in the hours.

One night I told Robyn, if it didn’t let up I would go to the ER or Urgent Care. When I came out of the bathroom, she was dressed and ready to go. Let me just rest for a minute, I said and then after a while, I’m okay now, I just need to sleep. The next morning we went to an Urgent Care center.

The nurse there ordered a Ct scan and I was sent home with a big bottle of Oral Contrast liquid which I forced down before the test. My stomach was already full and taut like a drum. Nauseous at the imaging center, I fled to a bathroom as Robyn signed me in but I was able to hold down the liquid for the test. Once home I threw up everything and felt the first relief from pain in days. And I slept through the night.

As it happened, we had a trip scheduled for the next morning. All things considered, it went okay and once we got back to the dock I called for the results of the CT. The doctor or tech was both terse and curt. “You have a partial blockage - if you have a fever or more pain, you should go to the E.R.”

I hung up but I didn’t quite get it. I called back, asked at the nature or cause of the blockage. The voice sounded irritated with me and repeated exactly the words he had said before. I persisted and he repeated, more irritated now, “I said…”

Robyn and I decided we needed to see the report and drove out to the facility. The nurse at the counter handed me the report, I thanked her and went out to the car where Robyn was waiting. Scanning the one page document, I read the words Peritoneal Carcinomatosis. I googled it, read the first entry that popped up and showed the screen to Robyn. As it happened, I had chosen an older post from a few years back - it described peritoneal carcinomatosis as terminal and suggested 6 month survival, something that is not necessarily true anymore.

I remember exactly her look and words as she read the diagnosis and survival rate that I did - “I don’t know what I am I looking at?” she said unable to absorb the impact of the words.

“And behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house.”

She was facing the first report that our world was about to crash down around us.

And so it has.

For a while we tried to keep the business going. That ended when one trip I started feeling a little uncomfortable and then a little more and then a lot. Robyn was navigating the boat and I was doing my thing sharing what I had learned about the dolphins. I was distracted now and would offer a few remarks and then go to the back of the boat and try to gauge how bad what was going on in my stomach. I was getting clammy and sweating. After we had seen some dolphin and taken our guests to a barrier island, we made our apologies and cut the trip short.

The danger was that something might interfere with the beginning of chemotherapy that was scheduled to begin April 5th. I had already had a port surgically implanted in my chest to accept the drugs - reader, my loins were girded up. An obstruction in the small bowel could derail the first attempts to blunt and roll back this cancer’s determination to colonize my body.

After a short consult with the cancer docs, Robyn drove me to the ER.

There followed three days in one of the outer rings of hell.

In an attempt to distract sufferers of small bowel obstruction from their extreme discomfort, the medical profession invented the nasogastric tube (NG tube). It is a thick plastic tube that is pushed through the nose and into the stomach and it hurts like fuck.

The act of inserting the tube was horrific but for reasons I will describe, in my case, also surreal. For you see, long before J (the nurse assigned to me) leaned over me and said “Yeah man, I don’t know…they say you need one of these. It is going to hurt a lot,” I had begun to suspect that he was not in fact a nurse and did not work there. I couldn’t shake the notion that he was an imposter, a sociopath that walked in off the street and went unnoticed because things were so busy.

For one thing, he was never around when the various doctors were.

And his demeanor was entirely different from anyone else in the hospital. For example a little while after I had talked about pain a bit and how another blast of Dilaudid in the ol I.V would be nice, he passed by.

“ I don’t know where these doctors are, but I got you covered with the dilaudid bro,” And he half pulled his hand from his pocket and surreptitiously showed me four loaded syringes, as if he had access to drugs from an entirely different channel free of the oversight and authority of the doctors.

At that point the pain was such that I didn’t give a shit - dude had the goods -I was like, cool, hook me up and from that point forward I was complicit in his charade.

He came over and showed me the NG tube as he removed it from its packaging. He had me examine it as if to impress upon me just how much what was about to happen was going to suck. “The thing is, as soon as I push this through your nose, you gotta start swallowing and keep swallowing or it will come out your mouth.”

And with that he commenced pushing this fairly rigid plastic tube into my skull and I, still in thrall of my paranoid fantasy, not knowing if any doctor had actually ordered this or if it was just the sick fetish of my latest drug dealer, started swallowing and swallowing as he guided it toward my throat and into my stomach.

And there it stayed for the next three days. Initially, hooked to a pump, it emptied the contents of my stomach. Then that was turned off and the tube remained just in case.

The days spent in the hospital room have a hallucinatory quality. I wasn’t eating or being given anything to drink. I just sat there like a head impaled on a stake and anytime I was compelled to swallow the tube further irritated my throat. I was so happy when the nurse agreed to let me suck on some crushed ice until I realized that whatever relief the ice gave to my dry mouth was paid for by my throat when I had to swallow.

Well, the long and the short of it is that there was indeed a small bowel obstruction but the procedure to image that obstruction also had a therapeutic effect. It helped to clear it enough that I could avoid surgery. That was huge - chemo would not be delayed.

The tube was ripped out and I was sent home.

Chemo treatments started on schedule. Every two weeks on Tuesday, I go and get hooked up and various drugs drip into me for the next four hours or so. Then upon departure I am fitted with a small pump that continues to deliver drugs for the next two days.

And that brings us to the night I found myself in the bathroom with Job, me with my burning ass, he with his boils. It was after my second session of chemo. A new drug had been added to the mix and it was kicking my butt a bit. One side effect was that I would wake up fifteen or so times a night. The other was that I was bouncing between constipation and, as I mentioned, diarrhea.

And sitting there with Job, it struck me how much life had changed - from boating in the Ten Thousand Islands and monitoring the resident bottlenose dolphin community to, well this, sitting on the toilet at four in the morning, obsessively monitoring my chaotic digestive processes. Yeah I guess you could say I was feeling sorry for myself but really I was just marveling at the magnitude of the change. Like Job, but in my own secular way, I wondered at how I arrived here.

So you actually confronted God, demanded an answer? I said to Job.

He shook his hands in front of his face as if to say, forget all that, it doesn’t matter -

“What you got to do now is ride the rap, as they say. It’s all anybody has to do.” and then he pointed to the Manwipes - “may I"?”

“Oh yes, totally, I should have..”

He took the soft, fragrant towelette, moistened with Aloe and daubed at his suppurating boils. A smile, a look of something like pleasure dawned on his face.

“Oh that’s nice.”

“Right? Beats the heck out of a potsherd any day of the week.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, listen” I said a little apologetically, “I’m gonna head back to bed, see if I can’t get a little sleep. Thanks for the words of wisdom - always good to meet another Elmore Leonard fan.”

“Yeah no worries - if you’re gone, I’m gone.”

“Oh right, of course.”

So yeah, riding the rap, same as anyone has to do. And the cancer one isn’t any more difficult than that of anyone else - say a young couple raising a family or a teacher trying to reach kids in the midst of a pandemic. It’s easier really than trying to start a small business if a tad more unpleasant. Oddly enough the biggest change in my perspective since this diagnosis sidelined me is a greater appreciation for just how difficult the daily struggle of most people is and how most of them carry it off with grace.