Every other Monday my wife and I would pack up my leather “cancer bag” with snacks and box drinks and CDs – the CD player, of course – my journal, a few Depends, and head on down to the infusion center at 38th and Market. Life with cancer is nothing if not routine. Cancer has no discipline. It’s dumb and sloppy and dangerous, like a teenager with a chainsaw. The only way to beat it is to surprise and confuse it – shock and awe – with careful and tedious planning, methodology and pinpointed surgical attacks. Like the way those SEALs dudes got Bin Laden.
With routine and regimen comes familiarity. You find yourself surrounded by the same people on the same regimen Monday after Monday. About half way through my four-hour drip each Monday, a couple would arrive and almost always be seated directly across from me in my recliner and my wife in her straight back chair.
The first man was a somber vision, a shell of a man barely held together in his ill-fitting, disheveled shirt and sports coat; his belt was wrapped around his waist one time and a half. His shoes were shined and tied up tight but his socks were baggy and drooping around his ankles. Someone, not himself, had dressed him. Which brings me to the second man.
Find out what's happening in Abingtonfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
The second man was bright eyed and bushy tailed. Buttoned up and doubled down for business. He had all the papers, all the forms, all the cards and referrals and all the answers for the questions the techs and nurses were going to ask him – and all the questions he had for them at his fingertips. His “cancer bag” wasn’t just a few TastyKakes and box drinks and diapers, it was “cancer central.”
The second man attended to his partner, meeting his every need, telepathically responding … the way a new mother might second guess her infant’s every seemingly innocuous twitch. The second man asked for a pillow and placed it behind the first man’s head and neck. The second man read to the first man. The second man helped the first man out of his recliner and guided him, in his walker, with all the tubes and bags and that stainless steel tree, to the bathroom, and into the bathroom, and out of the bathroom and back to his recliner. The second man wiped the first man’s nose and cleaned up the puke off the front of the first man’s jacket. The second man held the first man’s hand, so tightly sometimes I wondered if he was trying to infuse some of his bottomless reserve of hope into his frail companion.
Find out what's happening in Abingtonfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
The second man was all hope, so much hope that it hurt to watch him. Hope is a wonderful thing but when it’s the only thing you have, it can look very much like hopelessness.
I don’t know what the relationship was between these two men. All I did know was that the second man was devoted to the first man. And I got it. There was never a question in my mind why the second man was behaving the way he was.
I mean, everyone would.
You will stop at nothing, try everything to keep the person you love with you one second longer. Hang on. Hang on, so tightly sometimes it hurts. But what about the first man? Why was he behaving the way he was? It was obvious that he had reached the tipping point in his life. There was not a spark left in his weary soul. His heart was beating out of sheer habit, going through the motions. His heart simply wasn’t in it. The pain and misery of yet another cycle of this merciless treatment could not have been worth the few months, weeks or days it was buying him. The law of diminishing returns was walking up his heels.
At the time, I wondered if I was staring into a crystal ball and watching myself in the not too distant future. But of course I had no crystal ball.
Nobody does.
All I had were statistics and odds and studies and all the other gobbledygook that the doctors would quote whenever I asked them what my chances were. Not exactly a crystal ball, but just as mysterious and enigmatic. The first man drooped over in his recliner causing the second man to summon the staff. The terror in his eyes was more than I could bear. I told my wife that if it ever came to that if I ever had to go through this again, I wouldn’t.
“Yes you will,” she said curtly. And didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day.
And then it hit me. I suddenly understood the first man and why he was doing what he was doing.
My wife had become the second man.
