Adventures in Chemotherapy

You know work is bad when you prefer spending the day at the chemotherapy treatment center.

 

My job has myriad, disparate tasks.  Myriad.  And disparate.  And here lately these pesky insistent little duties have all hooked their long fingers around one or the other of my limbs and started trotting off in their disparate directions, threatening to tear me apart, medieval execution style.  Then yesterday, the Biggest Baddest Need of them all stepped up, swept away all of his grabby competitors-for-my-attention, and demanded all of me, for 6 hours.

 

This Biggest Baddest Need was a friend’s cancer.  A key employee is needed at a key meeting that cannot be re-scheduled.  His wife is due her weekly Thursday chemo session, also un-cancel-able.  So to free up the key employee, I am sent to take the wife.  I am the HR Manager and also she happens to be a close friend.  I’m happy to do it – I’ve done similar things before.  This is the part of my job that I like – helping people out.  Much better than filling in benefits forms or uploading training documents or what have you.

 

Sarai’s about 5 feet tall, a tiny and very stylish wee thing.  She’s a foreigner in America, where she has to talk about cell counts and hemoglobin and radiation treatments in a language that is foreign to her.  This boggles the mind.  She is trooping along quite well, with an intravenous port embedded in her chest, an itchy wig to preserve her dignity, and huge sunglasses to hide her tired face.  She feels ugly, sick, wretched, but still looks like a movie star to me, and she is pretty perky on the drive up to Duke’s cancer center.  Unlucky though she is to have the big C, she’s lucky she lives within 30 minutes of one of the best cancer centers in the country.  A lot of people we will meet in the waiting room drove four hours to get to their weekly treatment.

 

We go to her first appointment in one of the internal clinics.  The receptionist ignores us for ten minutes though there is no one else around, and then snatches the appointment card and refuses to speak slowly or clearly to my obviously foreign friend.  She turns her back to us and murmurs something, then leaves us standing up there for a long time, Sarai holding out a credit card to pay the copay.  Apparently what Nasty McNasterson had said with her back turned was that we were to sit down, because 5 minutes later she looks up at us as if she’s never seen us before, and yells at us to sit down and wait to be called, we should know by now she doesn’t need payment.  I am livid.  Sarai just says mildly – "they are usually so nice here, I wonder what is the problem with her?" 

 

After that short appointment, we head upstairs to the chemo treatment center to wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Over two hours we wait for her to get started, and the chemo itself takes 5 hours to complete.  I can’t believe they do this every week – a whole day of your life, every week.  Just what you want to lose when you are deathly ill – precious time.  There are dozens of people in the waiting room.  Some look like Sarai, hearty men and women – you can tell they’re wearing wigs, but otherwise I wouldn’t know they were ill.  Others look like cancer patients.  Small.  Hairless.  Clutching homemade blankets or dressed up teddy bears, with colorful depressing too-large head scarves, wooly stripey socks, layers of clothes hanging off their slight frames.  Chemo makes you cold.  It also can render your limbs numb – Sarai can’t feel her hands.  A woman seated behind us couldn’t feel her feet.  She said it made going to work hard, not being able to walk and all.  Sarai blinked back tears – "how can you go to work like this?"  She saw a teenager on her way in for treatment and broke down again.  Sarai is older – in her sixties, not done with life by any means, but no longer at the beginning of her life.  It breaks her heart to see young people suffer like her.  To see people with hopeful families along.  To see people coming to treatment alone, without a family.  The whole center is a minefield for her maternal, loving heart, and I tear up myself when I see her cry. 

 

But it isn’t all weepy misery.  It’s mostly boring.  Sitting – boring.  Sipping coffee while trying to come up with non-cancer-related small talk – boring.  Waiting for her beeper to buzz and let her know we can go in – boooooring.  Once we get inside, we are bustled into her area by efficient and friendly nurses.  They sit Sarai down in a cushy chair, with her own personal flat screen t.v. hanging above, the remote by her side.  We visitors get hard and uncomfortable chairs, but I don’t mind – it’s not about me on this day.  The lights are dim, since chemo makes you uber sensitive to all stimulation.  Sarai doesn’t want her tv on.  As soon as they get her IV hooked up and dripping, she winces from the bad taste in her mouth.  She closes her eyes and starts to look, for once, as sick as she is.  She doesn’t sleep, just lays there, no tv, no talking, just existing, eyes half closed.  Waiting out the drip drip drip drip, five hours of it.  She’s in such a trance, when I go to tuck the blanket around her neck, she jumps out of her skin.  I sit and watch her.  I have nothing to do but sit with her.  If I do this again I’ll know to bring a magazine, because once the IV starts she doesn’t want talk anymore, and five hours is a long time to sit in a hard, uncomfortable chair with only a handful of medical pamphlets to read.

 

Her husband relieves me a few hours later.  I squeeze her foot on my way out the door.  I try to smile at every patient as I walk out, but they don’t see me.

 

Sarai has a prognosis for full recovery.  It may recur again, but probably not until she is very old, and she is ok with that thought.  Another several months of chemo are in her future, but she has every hope of survival, which made the whole day less depressing for me than it would have been otherwise.