J. and the Waiting Place

This is day 4 of my chemo, and I’m starting to feel it (fear not, dear Reader, this isn't nearly as depressing as that sentence sounds). Day 1 I felt normal, Day 2 brought on some fatigue, but yesterday afternoon felt like I took a stun gun to the chest. It knocked me down and stole my lunch money. It had its way with me and didn’t even take me out to dinner first. This morning brought real improvement, though I expect things will end up this evening much like last night. So here we go! I’m climbing back into the ring a little bruised and with one of those bleeding cuts above an eye that fighters always get because I’m a stupid glutton for punishment.

In the meantime, the port they placed in my chest so they can more easily pump the hopefully life-giving and/or fatally toxic medications hurts like a son of a gun. It was placed less than a week ago in what was sold to me as a “minor procedure” that felt a lot more like “major surgery”, and has since been accessed four times by needles that are so long I don’t understand how they don’t poke all the way through the port and out my back. And the thing is that each successive stick hurts a little more, because the surgery site still isn’t healed up and it’s getting angrier and angrier. I bought some lidocaine cream last night and forgot to bring it today, so I knew accessing the port today was going to hurt before I even arrived.

And then I met the guy who would be accessing said port, and my fears were not alleviated. Let’s call him J. to protect this man’s identity. Underneath J’s shaven head, bushy blonde eyebrows, and intensely blue eyes you’ll find thick, beefy arms both covered in full tattoo sleeves with catchy and concern-inducing mottos like “pain is an illusion” (except to the patient), and “broken” (the people left in his wake?). To complement these little gems and fill out the rest of the sleeves, he’s covered in images of women weeping over tombstones labeled “darkness” and a large skeleton praying over a rosary. Yeah, this is the guy who will be stabbing the needle in my super-sensitive, not-yet-healed port today. My chances for a gentle stick that didn’t result in mind-altering pain were rapidly plummeting into the zero range.

And I’m proud to report that J. really lived up to the image he’s putting out there into the world. One jab at me was enough to curl my toes, but it wasn’t until he stepped back and then came at me with his full weight a second time that my feet left the floor and my eyes threatened to bug out of my head like Bugs Bunny’s. It seems he got all that latent animosity out of his system right there up front, though, because since then he’s been as soft-spoken as ever and, like all healthcare employees I’ve encountered, suitably relentless in his attempts to provide me with a warm blanket. Way to be, J.

So now that J. has completed his fiendish task, I have time in between super kind visitors to look around this place, the “oncology infusion” room, and notice that this place isn’t really what you’d expect. I’d expect it to be like the Waiting Place in Oh, the Places You’ll Go:

…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
Or a bus to come, or a plane to go
Or the mail to come, or the rain to go
Or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
Or waiting around for a Yes or No
Or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

But it’s not like that at all. It’s actually quite a productive place, in a useless, just-passing-the-time sort of way. From the vantage point of my seater-heater equipped recliner, everybody I can see is at least 40 years older than me, so the activities represented do represent those of a certain generation. Sue Grafton and Steven King are really getting exercised across the room, while some amorphous yellow-orange blob of a scarf? is really coming along next door. And don’t forget that white blood cell counts are plummeting and red blood counts are being decimated simultaneously all around us.

So maybe this place, like a lot of others, isn’t so useless after all. And it occurs to me that that’s part of what makes cancer suck, too: it makes you feel useless. It takes you out of the communal game of life to play your own, much lonelier game alone on the sidelines. You’re playing solitaire by yourself in the end zone of the high school football game. While everybody else is going to soccer practice and zipping by in red fire trucks (I literally stood on a street corner this morning and watched as my crew drove by on the engine I would be driving en route to a call if I didn’t have cancer), you’re still just standing there isolated like bubble boy thinking your own thoughts in your own little cancer-filled world. I don’t mean to suggest that everything about my life is defined by cancer, just that my life is different than all of those around me now that cancer has interjected itself into it. The overall effect is to leave a guy feeling, well, useless. Stuck in the Waiting Place for months without purpose or hair.

But… maybe this place isn’t so useless? I certainly hope it’s not as useless as it feels. Maybe this cancer place, just like the Oncology Infusion room, has more going on than meets the eye. It’s easy to look at the pale, drawn faces and the IV’s filled with poison and see only death at work here, but the truth is that a lot of life happens here, too. It’s just harder to see- you have to pick up a rock and look underneath to find it sometimes. So here’s to hoping things aren’t as they seem, that there’s radiance and beauty hidden just beneath the surface of all the junk of this place and this life. I think there is. I think it’s there, and I sure hope to see it.