We’re staying on the fringes of a section of sprawling Houston called “the Medical Center,” our neighborhood a disjointed hodgepodge of highrises, some aesthetically interesting, others not so much so.

View from our hotel window

However, we’re not visiting Houston to take in its architectural wonders; we’re here seeing medical wonders. Today Judy has an appointment with T-cell lymphoma guru Dr. Michelle A. Fanale, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the best in the nation. The series of buildings that constitute the Anderson complex is extensive, impressively massive, each adorned with the red-slashed cancer logo.

Our hotel, Wyndham Suites, is a mere 15-minute walk, so we hoof it through the blistering heat, sweat streaming from under my fedora. Judy has wisely ditched the wig, opting instead for a pastel aqua green headscarf that makes look like a lovely lean tropical Muslim.[1]

As we drop into Anderson Café for breakfast, I practice my hobby of late, trying to ascertain who has cancer and who doesn’t. It’s harder than you might think. In the misnamed café (think cafeteria) I see no scarf-wearing or hatted women and only one ashen-faced fellow with the telltale baseball cap, though many people seem to have locomotion issues, and more than a few suffer severe obesity.

Once we’ve dumped our trash, we board the B elevators and shoot up to the Lymphoma/Myeloma center and have a seat and wait until Patricia, a smiling 50-something African American invites us into her office to process Judy’s admission. Patricia’s absolutely delightful, chatty, sincerely interested in us. As she goes over scads of information while Judy electronically signs permission after permission, I ask her if she’s a native Texan.

She theatrically bats her eyes. “Yes sir. Do you detect a hint of a drawl?”

She’s never been to Charleston but has been to North Carolina, where her Marine son was stationed. His wife’s from Virginia Beach, so she has been “to that beach.”

“I’m hoping you have some grandchildren,” I say.

Her eyes light up as she broadly smiles. “Eight,” And she was recently with all eight in Gatlinburg, which “was just breathtaking.”

The absolutely best news is that because Judy has met her deductible, 100% will be covered by our insurance.

“That’s the one good thing about having cancer,” Judy says.

We return to the seating area and another woman, a Latina, comes up and introduces herself as a sort of concierge. I mention that rumor has it that there’s a bar in the hospital, and she happily informs me that it’s true and that she’s glad to see I have my priorities right. She hands us her card and is off.

Once Judy has her vitals recorded, we enter the examination room where I continue to grade essays electronically. We meet our head physician’s nurse and someone shadowing her. Both are young, black, friendly but businesslike.

A brisk knock and a nurse practitioner enters, a husky young man around forty or so whom I deduce is Hawaiian because of his appearance and the fact that he greets people with “aloha.”

He has Judy give an oral history from the original discovery of the original tumor in July 2014, up through the reoccurrence in March of this year, all the way to last Thursday’s biopsy. These are painful recollections, especially the last five months.

Our next visitor is physician who has Judy sign forms giving permission to use her “fluids and tissues” for research. She’s probably about our age, short and rotund with curly black dyed hair.

“Forgive me if you can’t understand my English,” she says. “It’s Egyptian English.”

We assure her we can perfectly understand her. She asks Judy if she’s Lebanese, says she looks Lebanese, and goes on to add that even though Egypt has 7000 years of civilization, the Lebanese are more forward thinking. “They’re open,’ she says, “more progressive” – she rolls her r’s. “Now they’re just killing each other.” I mention that I hear it’s worse now that Mubarak’s gone.

“Yes,” she says. “It would be nice to have Mubarak back. It’s hard to run a country. You need to know what you’re doing.”

I mention Mr. Trump, and she smiles without comment and after a few minutes leaves us once again alone., assuring us that Dr. Fanale is a genius and that full recovery is possible. “You have to be strong,” she says. “I just had heart failure last week, and look at me. I’m strong.”

More essay grading.

Finally, Dr. Fanale arrives with a clipboard and an offered hand. She explains to us that because we don’t have a baseline PET scan to compare the latest growth that we need to have tests run tomorrow and from there decide to continue the present course of treatment (ICE with a future allo stem cell transplant) or not. She mentions several alternate options running off a list of polysyllabic drugs. She strongly suggests we have the theoretical stem cell at Anderson because they do hundreds a year and have specific knowledge of T-cell lymphoma reactions, which may differ from other cancer patient’s reactions.

“Well, I was just told you are a genius,”  Judy tells Dr. Fantale.

“I don’t know if I’m a genius,” she replies, “but I am an experienced expert in T-cell lymphomas.”

* * *

We’ll meet her again on Wednesday and discuss the results of the tests and treatment strategies.

I won’t say I left the joint upbeat, but it’s gratifying to know that several other options exist other than the one Judy has been following.  It also occurred to me that at least at MD Anderson immigration seemed to be working just fine.

Now, it’s time to snag Uber, hightail it to Kroger’s, stock up on some beer, and suffer through the Gamecock opener.

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[1] As anyone who has traveled with us knows (right Beth Hudson Clifton), Judy has an aversion to taking taxis, so don’t blame me for making her walk half a mile to seek cancer treatment.

 

 

 

Appetizer

Not surprisingly, Wordly Wise, the vocabulary series we use at my school, tilts big time towards those words brought over to England from France by William the Conqueror and his various cousins, i.e., words of Latinate origin. This imbalance, of course, makes perfect sense given the College Board’s predilection for polysyllabic words and that our students will be spending not an inconsiderable amount of their adult lives chattering away at upper tier cocktail parties.

Obviously, softening “cowardly” to “pusillanimous” at a St. Cecilia Ball might be judicious, especially considering the status of the target of the aspersion, and it’s not as if all failures-of-nerve are created equal. Throwing down your weapon and turning tail at the command charge is not the same as wincing your way through a racist joke without protest.

The problem with Latinate diction, though, is that it often comes off as stuffy, to use an Anglo Saxon word, or pretentious, to use a Latinate synonym. You might even say – I’m sure someone has – that Latin appeals to the cranium/head, Anglo-Saxon to the viscera/gut.

Anyway, if you’re a new English teacher at our school, one of your many chores is to do Wordly Wise exercises, and at the beginning of a school year, if you’re an enterprising new teacher and headed from Charleston, SC, to Rhode Island to attend a friend’s wedding, you might decide to bring Wordly Wise along in your carry-on to bang out some exercises while you wait for boarding, wait during your layover at Baltimore, fly over the Northeast corridor, etc.

This scenario describes my new English colleague Emily Neilson’s weekend. Emily did bring her Wordly Wise along, she did do the exercises, but she also wrote a letter to her students describing the weekend’s adventures and in doing so used every word in Chapter 1 of the Book 8 Edition of Wordly Wise!

The piece is downright inspired, brilliant, a tour de force, yes!, so I pleaded with her to let me share it with you, which she graciously has.

(By the way, if any of my former students are reading this, I encourage you mentally to circle any Wordly Wise words you come across and see if you still remember them.)

Emily, take it away:

Entree

Musings, Off-and-Onhand: Worldy Wise Essay, Edition I

Good morning, my little English ensemble, vibrant with curiosity and intellect and Joie de vivre. As I sat at the gate of the Providence Airport yesterday watching the phalanxes of folks line up to board flight after flight, I worked on my Wordly Wise homework. Yes, people, don’t ring the tocsins and become rambunctious, refractory parolees all because you have learned that teachers must also endure the tribulations of homework. It is of tertiary importance in this moment, but it is true that the Sunday Scaries are known by all — old and young, men and boys, women and girls, large and small, short and tall — what a swamp of lyrical empathy, a paregoric that should assuage us somewhat from feeling totally disconsolate. And if you do indeed set out to break the trajectory of my story, I will corral you back with the figurative lariat I own as a teacher. I am the maestro – or is it maestra? – within this classroom, this cornucopia of learning. Anyways, there I sat at the gate, oscillating between my Wordly Wise and my phone, and I thought how you might enjoy a story from my weekend, and so I began to indite right there, at gate 19, in Providence, at 11:12 am, telling you about my weekend – a meteoric one – spent in the hinterlands of New England, witnessing the nuptials of my friend.

As you might know by now, one of my favorite maxims is to “throw kindness like it is confetti.” I am equable in that belief, steadfast in my semi-dogmatic notion that kindness is the thing that helps us mortals hold up the cosmos.

I, however, also believe that sometimes kindness is not the cure-all, and sometimes situations call for more acetic approaches and attitudes. So there I was on my flight starting the descent to Baltimore early Saturday morning when I felt a rogue hand creep onto my knee. The rogue hand was attached to the man seated beside me, and I wondered, what was he thinking? That I was an effete sort of gal? That my effeminate ensemble afforded him an itinerary for his hand to explore my knee? That when I asked him earlier, “Is that seat taken?” I had intimated some wish for his hand’s current oscillations or for some clandestine maneuvers later to come? That I, a woman, rode some kind of tame, precious, subdued palfrey? No, sir! I opt for the wild mustangs roving the Staked Plains, unbridled, beneath the biggest skies, because I am one of those wild mustangs! Desist your tactile infraction! What a stupid, insipid attempt to cultivate romance! Was I disconsolate, you wonder? Would I be his collateral in the enterprise? Some kind of feminine lien that he could use and abuse and lose? Would I devolve in my integrity and sense of self? What, no! Students, listen to me: I was vibrant in my fusillade, impeaching this scoundrel for his manual traipsing. I repelled his advance; I felt refractory to every ounce of this meretricious loser. I needed my mace, either to spray in his eyeballs, making them rheumy, or to club over his head and dash out his brains like the Roman Heroes do in scenes atop ancient, marble friezes. I refrained from asphyxiating him, but my counterattack had plenty of those motifs to do the figurative trick. I might not be a professor emeritus, but I am smart enough to believe that there’s a good kind of love out there to keep me from temporizing for such airborne garbage!

I wish to spend no more time on such filth, trenchant as I may sound now, and perhaps sometime down the road we will exhume the story and laugh about it together — I assure you we won’t have to exhume him. Or will we …

What I do wish to tell you is this: that in Little Compton, Rhode Island on Saturday afternoon, a svelte bride married a svelte groom, beneath ray upon ray of light that streamed through the big windows of a white church, sitting beneath a blue sky. But that’s not right because the sky wasn’t just made of blue that Saturday, but out of sapphire, topaz, turquoise, indigo. It was the firmament of heaven, overarching everyone who has ever lived and ever will. It was made out of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. It was made from the Big Bang which blew all those bits at the very beginning into a trajectory which would eventually lead to him and her, and to you and me. It was a regular stone transformed into a small opulence and held, tiredly, in the hand of the lapidary who had stooped for hours at his wheel, chipping and chipping away to unleash a beauty he knew possible all along. Or maybe it was in another hand, in the quivering hand of a maestro as he holds on to the last notes in their last moments before cutting all that cornucopic, symphonic sound, creating a vast, sudden, and evanescent silence.

But in the late afternoon light on a Saturday in Little Compton, Rhode Island beneath one blue, blue, blue August sky, evanescent also means this: as the minister spoke to the couple and the congregation about love’s many forms, the man standing before the altar reached out through the air, almost imperceptibly, and without taking his eyes off the minister, and sought to find the hand of the woman beside him; and she, at the very same moment and without taking her eyes off the minister and also almost imperceptibly, let go a hand from her bouquet and reached out to hold onto his.