Chemo Round #4

 

Chemo round #4 was a bit slow getting started today, due to a backlog from the long weekend, apparently. It didn't matter, I got in, and here I am getting my treatment.

A dear friend asked me recently if it (the cancer) felt "more real" when I was a the hospital for tests and procedures, and dealing with doctor and nurses. I had to think for a moment, and then I told her, no, it doesn't seem "more real" here. It's "real" all the time, 24/7.

What being at Princess Margaret feels like is that I'm doing the work to get better: every jab, prod, inopportune question; every use of any word that would normally make me flinch, but which sound merely matter-of-fact coming from the medical professionals, just feels like climbing that hill in the service of reaching that blessed, dreamed-of summit.

I've been in business class airport lounges that have a higher stress level that the "chemo daycare" waiting room at the hospital, surrounded by people who are ostensibly fighting for their lives. I may be projecting, but 25 years of journalism has made me a pretty good observer, if I may say so myself, and what I've observed is...calm. Resigned calm, I'm sure, in some cases, but calm nonetheless.

We're all just getting on with it.

To the right of me this morning, a husband asked his wife what she wanted him to bring her from Tim Hortons. "Do you want a double-double?" he asked her, clearly something she'd had before and enjoyed. She made a moue with her mouth and said, "Heavens no, not this morning. Too sweet." Off he went to bring his love her bounty, to make the morning sweeter, even if the coffee shouldn't be.

To the left of me, a father and son, who reminded me of salt shakers made by the same company 30 years apart, discussed an upcoming fishing trip in broad, blue-collar Canadian accents—the kind of near-melodious yawing that is often imitated by television actors and comedians, but which they never entirely nail. The son tells his father about a relative who has stocked her private fish pond so densely that you see the fish before you see the water. Maybe we should fish there this fall when you're better, the son joked. "She's crazy as hell," the old man wryly says of his relative with the overstocked pond. "And that wouldn't be fishing as we know it."

There are others who orbit the waiting room. A young man pushes a wheelchair in which is seated a woman whom I at first take for his mother, but a closer look reveals a young woman, her smooth scalp a testament to the ravages of chemo, her body as delicate as a hummingbird swaddled in a lilac fleece hoodie and leggings.

If you merely look, you see a man pushing wheelchair; if you look with your heart as well as your eyes, you see love in every gesture—a gentleness in the way he pushes slowly not to jar her; and for her part, she leans up against the rails of the chair, every gesture calm, knowing he's there to protect her, and whatever the bogeyman of cancer is doing to her, he'll stand between her and everything else.

When we think cancer, we often just think pain and illness. When you're in it, and you're looking, you see so much more: a universal vulnerability, infinite tenderness abounding, kindness and a degree of resignation that never loses its hopefulness.

Unlike many of the people here, I have always preferred to travel to the hospital alone. My loved ones (not the least of which my husband) have been solicitous and caring beyond measure. I have had countless offers to travel to and from chemo sessions and appointments, but I've always demurred. I learned early in my life, and the hard way, that I prefer to face ordeals on my own terms. I like arriving and leaving in an Uber with my own thoughts and my own impressions in my mind until I have to reconnect with other people. It's the ultimate "alone time."

All of that said, I've lately come to realize that my "independence" around this stuff has been bought and paid for by the people I love, the ones who allow me to the luxury of feeling "alone," because I absolutely know I am not, because they're there.

I don't know what it would be like to go through this truly alone, and I don't want to, and I suspect that's something I share with the other units-of-two huddled together in the waiting room, all of us waiting for our pagers to go off because it's time to sit in the chair and be hooked up to the machines so we can keep climbing that hill.