CHEMO QUILTING CIRCLE
Arrest me now. I am a fake. I don't have problems. I don't have it rough. I'm not pained. I'm not sick. I'm not suffering. I'm just normal.
Walking into my first day of chemotherapy these thoughts just keep recycling themselves over and over in my head. I receive chemo treatments to kill some extra antibodies; these people receive it to kill tumors, to avoid having a breast removed, to maybe have their sickness go into remission. I feel like I should have a hidden camera in the process of doing a documentary, just a healthy onlooker into this world of sickness.
I stick out like a sore thumb after the thumb as been slammed in a car door. In the waiting room I place myself next to a lady maybe forty-five years old, but she looks sixty, I feel like the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man next to her small frame. I notice a trend in the fashion sense of most of the women. Apparently you are required to buy a pair of Birkenstocks, and all your clothes must be purchased from the latest LL Bean catalog. They almost resemble bald hikers who haven't quite committed to the hippy look. I just don't fit in. Maybe my next treatment I will do a complete makeover, shave my head, buy some of those horrid brown shoes, and sport a flannel shirt. Or, maybe I won't, because the thought of resembling overweight Sinead O'Connor who is about to go climb a mountain does not appeal to me. Some sport a scarf to cover their head, some don't, some don a wig, but some have a sense of reality.
I find myself drawn to the secretary. What a terrible job that must be? I wonder if she ever slips up when making an appointment, and utters, we'll see you in 2 months, when you're that much closer to dying.
It sounds so terrible, and I am already on my way to hell anyways. But, these patients are so positive it almost makes me sick to my stomach. They sit in circles and speak of hope, all of them looking over their various books, with trite titles like, Living with sickness. Conquering the Big C. and, Life: My Gift. Meanwhile, I sit quietly playing Tetris on my cell phone. But, their words are having an effect on me, and I have the sudden urge to sew a ‘Hope Quilt'.
We receive the actual treatments in a large room with about twenty medical recliners. where patients can relax. I am seated next to a man who is about sixty years old. He immediately strikes up conversation. Conversation in this environment consists of talking about your certain disease. The man tells me about how his cancer started in his ankle and then spread up through his leg and now is in his rib cage. He pulls up his pant leg to reveal a scar the size of a standard ruler. See, this scar? They had to put a cadaver bone in there, because the cancer ate away the other one.
I hear the word ‘cadaver' and my mind is quickly diverted from my game of Tetris. So, they replaced your bone, with a dead persons bone?
Yeah, what else they going to do?
Immediately I think of Lieutenant Dan's magic legs from Forrest Gump, and almost bring it up to him, but arguing with a person while we are both hooked to I.V.'s seems wrong.
Yeah, I have got the guys hip too. I would show you that but I'm not going to pull down my pants, I barely know you.
Yet you have the urge to show me your freaky cadaver scar.
He continues on for about five minutes, almost regaling me with his story of how the pain in his back keeps him up most of the night, he has trouble breathing because the cancer has eaten away half of his rib cage and damaged most of his lungs. His wife left him ten years ago, for what he calls some ‘healthy' son of a bitch. Because of his condition he never sees his four children, and believes he will probably never see them again. He speaks to me with an almost distant tear in his eyes. Is this the first time he has ever spoken of these things to another? Or, is this his monthly therapy? Cathartically delegating his thoughts to the random person seated next to him. He turns to me, looks me straight in the eye, and asks, so, what's your problem, why are you here?
Are you kidding me? I can't follow that. I feel like I am about to show Ron Jeremy my penis!
Oh, I just had kidney failure, I mean, its nothing compared... He stops me.
That is terrible. A young kid like you. Maybe one night you and I could go dig up my cadaver benefactor and scrape out his kidneys and get you fixed up.
Our conversation ends with a good laugh. I say goodbye and never see him again, never knowing his name. He has given me a new outlook on the chemo world. As I leave, thoughts of hope and life circle my brain. A design begins to form in my head. The shape of the picture forming is square. In the center is a man on both knees praying to a figure missing his lower right leg and left hip. In the corners are four children with angelic faces with welcoming smiles. I walk outside stare up at the sky, take a deep breath and think to myself, Yeah that will be the perfect design for my ‘Hope Quilt'. |
