The Treatment Room

This day seemed a distant destination so many months ago. It was like the last few pages in a text book you're forced to read in a class you desperately don't want to take. You hold the book in your hands, feel the weight, examine the thin pages with the puny writing, and think there's no way you'll ever finish. But through plodding, griping, determination, cursing, praying and crying, those last few words in this horrible book are now, at this very minute, within my wife's sight.

Today is the day of my wife's last chemotherapy treatment. In fact, I'm writing this about 4 hours into the infusion as she's beginning to drift off for her second nap. The whole process of switching out bags of various chemical toxins takes about seven hours. It's the eighth and last time she'll spend those seven hours in a vinyl recliner, set amongst the other twenty five in the room. From the bleachers where us non-combatants sit, it all looks so straight forward and harmless. But a few things belie that notion. Buzzers beeping. Nurses bouncing from one patient to the next. Spouses and friends sitting across or beside their loved ones as clear tubes drip clear poisons into the body. Held hands. Blankets pulled tight to drawn faces. It all makes the DMV look like not such a bad place after all.

Yet rising above the purpose of this place and the reality of it's guests, are qualities which hopefully help to balance the fear and lonesomeness that many of the patients surely feel. For it is from some of the patients themselves, those who bear the weight of the drugs and disease, that warmth and openness most freely flow. You'll see it when patients acknowledge one another with a brief, knowing smile. Or when, without hesitation, a complete stranger in the recliner to either side leans in to my wife to ask her how many treatments she has left, what kind of cancer she has, how she's feeling. For me at least, I found reassurance in those encounters. Despite that fact that Joy had already been put through the cancer wringer for four months prior to her first round, chemo still seemed like something that the real cancer patients went through, not my wife. Yet here was a stranger who seemed so comfortable with it all, exuding a confidence that stems from the realization that the battle can be won.

To clarify, all of this is easy for me to say. I'm just the by stander, the support team. I'm not leaving here with a needle jammed into the port in my chest that will continue to pump toxins for two days after I leave. I certainly won't feel the effects that have slowly built up in her body for the past four months. I feel the fear and worry, but in no way can I feel it like she does. But as the other half of our marriage, longing for the better half to be better again, I'm just thankful that this part is over for her. And if finding hope, kindness and friendliness in this most unlikely of spots helps her, or even me, to see the other side of this ordeal, then I'm thankful we sat there among those who shared it.