Chemo Round #3

 

Chemo round #3—maybe halfway done? We were a little late getting started today, but Princess Margaret isn't the worst place to hang out while you're waiting for your procedure to begin.

An elderly couple were in the lounge with me, waiting for the husband's chemo. The wife asked me if I could help her husband out of his wheelchair and onto the sofa where he could rest. I gladly agreed. He was almost weightless in my arms. He didn't look at me while I was helping him, and I instinctively knew that, for him, this was a matter of his dignity—even at his age (or perhaps particularly because of it) the notion of being lifted out of his wheelchair by a fellow cancer patient, and a stranger at that, was something with which he was not entirely comfortable.

His wife was grateful, however, and I noticed that she was likewise tentative and fragile in her movements.

I read my book, she read her book, and her husband dozed quietly on the sofa while we waited for our pagers to go off, announcing that our "beds" were ready.

As I watched them, I tried to consider what it would mean to have been married as long as they obviously had been—decades and decades—and to be this fragile, this vulnerable, and for one of them to be going through this cancer treatment. The Hero MD has been terrific, and I'm fairly strong, so it's less of an issue for us. But I was deeply moved by the gentle, measured, rickety, well-worn marital ballet of these two older people who loved each other as much as they obviously did, and who were facing the unthinkable with grace, and with unshakeable intertwined devotion.

Half an hour later, our pagers went off nearly simultaneously. I looked across the room to where the man was waking up from his nap, and his wife was gathering his belongings. I asked her, very quietly, if she'd like me to help her husband back into his chair. She said, "Would you please?" I said that of course I would. He trembled a bit as I helped him off the sofa. I told him, "It's OK, you're not going to fall," and got him into his chair. This time, he looked at my face and smiled, and said, "Thank you, I'm glad you were here." I told him I was glad, too.

If I'd helped him, he'd helped me too.

Cancer is the great equalizer. It makes one tribe out of disparate tribes, and it makes fellow travellers out of strangers. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, we owe each other a terrible loyalty.