cancer

Cancer, Camaraderie, and Clichés

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Unless you’re atypically morbid, like David Sedaris, who whiles away his time in airports “wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what,” chances are you’ve exiled the thought of your own mortality to the deepest, remotest outpost in the penal colony of your consciousness. And nothing screams mortality like a bald, cadaverous middle-aged woman sporting a pink baseball cap and a tee that reads “I Got Chemo Brain. What’s Your Excuse.”   Encountering her on a sidewalk, you might nod a quick greeting, or if she were preoccupied, avert your eyes.

That is, unless you — or someone very close to you — have/has been diagnosed with cancer. In that case, this plucky woman is a cognoscente, a knower, a fellow sufferer, a sister, so you look her in the eye, smile your most winning smile, and say hello.

Since my wife Judy’s diagnosis of lymphoma, we’ve by necessity been hanging out with cancer patients — at Roper’s/St Francis’s West Ashley Cancer Center, on the fifth floor of the old downtown Roper, and at an adjacent building where nurses administer white-blood-cell-enhancing injections on Sunday mornings to folks undergoing chemo.

Our first visit takes place on a day so bleak weatherwise that I expect to see the words “Directed by Ingmar Bergman” projected on the bank of dark gray clouds squatting over the harbor. There’s a flash flood warning until eleven, and the rain is steady but not torrential at the moment.

We arrive, take the elevator to the fifth floor (what is it about cancer and fifth floors?) to find at least a dozen people waiting for their injections. What strikes me foremost is how cheerful these folks seem to be. At first, the office is so crowded that we stand out in the hall and have a conversation with a robust-seeming but patchily bald thirty-something who is  (cliche #1) battling relapsed colon cancer, a disease first diagnosed when he was overseas on active duty. Obviously, he’s been dealt an unlucky genetic hand; his brother is also battling cancer, a lymphoma. He gives us the name of an author and book about some miraculous diet.

caneAs people exit, we make our way inside and have a seat. I’m across from a large man in his seventies wearing suspenders and holding a hand-carved cane in the shape of an egret in the big paw of his hand. This man’s head looks like a giant flesh-colored bowling ball, and he doesn’t have any eyebrows. As it turns out, he lives in the town of my birth, Summerville, and commissioned some local artisan to carve the cane for him. He says with a smile that his wife was supposed to come with him, but her head was under the covers when he left. “So I’m going to get some breakfast,” he says good-naturedly. “She can get her own breakfast.”

And then there is the smiling, petite, and ever so fragile-seeming older woman who looks as if she might weigh all of her eighty pounds. She’s wearing a baseball cap and speaks in a cheerful, clipped Northern cadence.

She knows things we as yet don’t know and serves as a wonderful role model. She’s come here alone with her (cliche #2) head held high, and seems perfectly happy.

Oh, these cliches! They’re impossible to avoid. When people ask, we say we’re optimistic but (cliche #3) taking it one day at a time, which, if you stop to think of it, is how we should live whether we’re suffering from cancer or just won the Powerball Jackpot. When I walk Saisy now, I take note of what I might have missed before, the smell of lighter fluid, the sight of pelicans in an unbalanced vee overhead, the sounds of squealing little girls dabbling in the waves.

Hanging Out at the Cancer Ward

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Roper Hospital and I go way back, way back to the early 50’s, back before my gestation, when my student nurse mother met my GI-Bill Clemson undergraduate father whose own mother was dying of cancer.

Smitten by a redhead in a uniform, Future Daddy asked Future Mama out.

As the story goes, Daddy’s go-to dating strategy was sympathy — not only was his mother dying, but he was so poor that he didn’t own any underwear. To prove he lacked boxers/briefs, he lifted his shirt, yanked checkered swim trunks into view. Perhaps being impoverished was sexy to children who grew up in the Depression.  Don’t think it would necessarily work today.

Anyway, this counterintuitive romantic ruse worked. Sue and Wes went out. My grandmother died. Sue and Wes eloped, dropped out school, engendered me. [1]

A bad karma kind of coming to be, if you stop and think about it.

 * * *

My beloved has been diagnosed with a difficult, rare, and therefore frightening cancer called Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma.

I won’t burden you with the existential horrors of waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting,   . . . in the primary care physician’s outer rooms/inner rooms . . . in the West Ashley Roper Cancer Center’s outer rooms/ inner rooms . . . trying to read the faces and body language of the physicians as they enter . . .

. . . a pleural effusion . . . a mass . . . cancer . . . probably lymphoma . . . t-cell lymphoma . . . blood work . . . CT scans . . . marrow bone biopsies . . .

 * * *

We’re at the downtown Roper, my mama’s Roper, my dead grandmama’s Roper.

My beloved’s here for five days, Monday through Friday, for 96-hours of constant infusion of a chemo regimen that goes by the acronym EPOCH. She’ll go home Saturday, have two weeks off, then return to Roper for five more days and repeat this pattern for six to eight cycles.

judy walkingSo Roper has become our home away from home.

What this hospital lacks in Spa-like aesthetics it makes for in interesting walks and outdoor venues. Because it’s been added on so often, Roper’s labyrinthine hallways might give Theseus a run for his money. It’s almost as if MC Escher himself designed the building. I park in the Doughty Street parking lot, which offers a fairly straight shot through the back door to the D elevators, which I take me up to the 5th Floor, Oncology. On the other hand, reaching the cafeteria from my beloved’s room is the human equivalent of a white rat’s journey towards the cheese.

The room itself is spacious and looks out on a narrow walkway. Because the walkway is only about fifteen feet wide, it gets no sun, so when you look through the narrow slats of the Venetian blinds, it’s always 9-pm dark out there, whether it’s 7am, noon, or 3 in the afternoon, I’ve dubbed this space the Twilight Zone. As it turns out, the window’s tinted black, which accounts for the perpetual night outside.

My beloved’s oncologist wants her to walk, so she does, hauling the chemo cart as she goes. On her excursions, she has discovered an accessible deserted hallway that brings to mind the former Soviet Union.

Here they store broken beds and other non-functioning equipment. The names of dead doctors appear beneath some of the doors. I love it back there — an objective correlative for aging’s entropy. Perhaps in one of these small rooms my grandmother died — but probably not. Even this old wing probably post dates her.
empty roombalcony view

 

 

 

 

 

 

The nurse’s station on the 5th Floor looks out onto the Ashley River. The 5th Floor also boasts a balcony with a view of Charleston’s most notable steeples. This morning’s humid breeze was strong enough to blow a string of meds off my beloved’s cart.

Of course, you can’t expect residing on a cancer floor not to have its downsides, like the constant moaning of a sleeping man a twist and turn further down in the hall.

Nevertheless, this isn’t Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. The nurses are great, and you hear a lot of laughter here.

[1] Crass Casualty and dicing Time.