I Would Prefer Not To - (#1)
A quarterly miscellany of essays by Richard Dooling and news about his upcoming books. Subscribe here.
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Even Odds
I'll begin at the beginning. In July of 1988, I was 34-years-old and a lawyer living in St. Louis. I was at my desk, leaning back in my swivel chair, hands folded on top of my head, when I felt a rough spot on my scalp. Probably that old scar I got running under the swing set, I thought.
A few days later I was sitting across the table from an oncologist who told me and my wife Kristy that I had melanoma of the scalp and an eight percent chance of living five years. At the time, we had a son and a daughter, both under two years of age.
The doctor showed me a bar graph from a recent study. "Actually it's probably less than eight percent," he said, "because we see satellite lesions, meaning the cancer has already spread."
A surgeon put me under and scalped me. The doctors sent the lesion to three different experts who would get back to us in a few weeks. For almost a month, I woke up every night at three in the morning and felt cancer spreading through my blood, bones, and lymph nodes.
I figured my life insurance would last Kristy and the kids a year or two, but then what? I tried to think of unmarried friends who might be willing to take my place and provide for my family after my death. Not my only desperate irrational idea, because I also thought of Anthony Burgess, who, in 1959 at the age of 42, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The doctors gave him one year to live. Burgess wrote five novels including Clockwork Orange in a single year to provide for his wife after his death, which as it turned out came thirty-four years later at age 76.
Burgess was a published novelist at the time of his brush with the beyond. All I had was an early unfinished draft of my first novel, Critical Care, a scathing medical satire I'd written years before while working night shifts in intensive care units as a respiratory therapist. I had seen dozens of people die in the hospital and had mastered the indelicate art of ICU gallows humor. But the novel might turn out less funny now that the melanoma had shown me what dying feels like to the patient.
I poured most of those feelings into a character I named Stella Stanley, a crusty ICU nurse played by Helen Mirren in the movie version. Stella was a breast cancer survivor who, like me, had been told that death was coming and soon. Memory is merciful, and psychic trauma tends to cover its tracks, as if the ghost in our machine is also an editor saying, "Well we don't need to remember how bad that was." But thanks to Stella I recall almost exactly what I thought about while waiting for test results.
Eternity assumed abbreviated, five-year proportions, and seconds became large rooms for Stella to sit in and realize that she was dying. That night, her evening walk lasted about six months. Clouds sailed through vistas of color, and all of nature held itself in a trance for her to look at for the first and last time.
I wish I was trying to be profound, but I just wanted a book advance. I took a one-month leave of absence from lawyering and finished a complete draft. The melanoma experts came back with good news. The cancer had not spread. Yet. My odds of living five years soared to 50 per cent. Even odds! I took them.
This short essay was originally published in the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, the cancer scare happened as described, but in those days there was no treatment for melanoma, so I received no chemotherapy or radiation. They simply scalped me and told me that if the cancer came back it would kill me. Thanks for that.
A new ebook edition of Critical Care participates in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited Program. A new paperback edition is also available. Critical Care makes fun of doctors and lawyers. Readers who work in health care tend to give it five stars, and those who don't are sometimes put off by what one reviewer called "a harrowing look at the American way of life-support."
Recent Books
In October of 2025, I published a novella called Send The Dead, a Caribbean horror story, which also included some short stories I've published over the years. In June of 2026, I will publish my sixth novel, The Acolyte, about an altar boy who must help a federal prosecutor and the FBI bust a Catholic priest's child exploitation ring.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why is the miscellany called I Would Prefer Not To?
A: In the 19th century, before typewriters, copy machines, and computers, lawyers hired scriveners to make copies of documents in longhand. Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener, perfectly captures the drudgery of a day job, especially the drudgery of working in a law office. Bartleby starts out as a diligent reliable employee, but one day the lawyer-boss tells Bartleby to copy a document. Bartleby refuses by saying, "I would prefer not to." Indeed, Bartleby thereafter refuses all instructions from his employer by saying, "I would prefer not to."
This refrain runs throughout the story and eventually drives Bartleby's boss to take extreme measures. "Well if you won't make copies, then you'll have to leave!" Bartleby replies, "I would prefer not to." I named this miscellany in honor of Melville and Bartleby, who was perhaps the first not-so-quiet quitter. By the end of Melville's tale, Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" speaks to us all.
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Issue #1
This email welcomes subscribers to I Would Prefer Not To, a miscellany published by Richard Dooling. This is issue #1. Find other issues at the Archives.
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