The awful, the reprieve, Maurice Sendak’s chicken soup with rice.
Snow falls early on this Thanksgiving morning. The nurse wakes me for meds and vitals. I am eighty-four miles from home. My window looks out into a courtyard with a fan of three white birches. In a wind, their papery bark ripples in the breeze. Nearby, an office window glows where someone is already working.
I am here for a haul. My daughter brought me the striped blue and green quilt from my bed, the worn hand-me-down that reminds of home.
Monday, the pain and awfulness returned. My daughters drove me not to the local ER this time, but down the interstate, the two of them in front, me in the back with a pillow staring out the window, to Dartmouth-Hitchcock. At the ER, they took blood, asked my story. Someone in the waiting room, who must have been a frequent flier, had been waiting for four hours was threatening to leave to get something to eat. The nurse said she couldn’t go. I was sent out, waited less than four minutes, and was taken in for antibiotics and saline and pain meds, another CT scan.
An MD, a second. An oncologist who explains slowly that the lymphoma I have often responds well to treatment, so reassuring. This raging infection. I am taken upstairs. My daughters, folding with exhaustion — it is now late again — head back up the interstate. Shortly afterwards, the oncologist returns and bends down to look directly at me, eye level. I know this position means bad news again. In the three-week span of CT to CT, the cancer has grown and possibly eaten into my bowel. Surgeons will be in shortly to speak with me about emergency surgery to remove a section of bowel. My thoughts immediately surge from Thank god, I may be alive in May with my family and see blue squill bloom to Are you fucking kidding me? It’s the middle of the night.
Middle of the night or no, the surgery team comes in and out, talking, talking. The lymphoma renders the CT scan unclear. Because my mind works this way, I size up the head surgeon: she’s long experienced in trauma and general surgery. Her fellow tells me he’s been working with her for six years. She tells me so much, all the terrible — and these are devastating — things that could go wrong me for in the next few hours. In the end, I trust my life to her. It is the only course.
I call my brother. We call my daughters, who have not yet slept. My brother gets in his black Subaru. My youngest drives our red Subaru and drinks a quart of cold coffee, a more experienced driver than her sister after a cross-country trip this summer. Is the moon guiding them? I don’t know.
In the OR, a woman whose name I don’t know holds my hand as I instantly go under. When I wake, so confused, in an enormous dark room — it’s the still the pitch of night — I immediately lift my jonny and look at my abdomen, asking what happened? My flat abdomen has no huge bandage. The surgeon had gone in with a camera and decided what remains is sufficient, for now perhaps, forever perhaps, to change perhaps. My oldest showed me a photo she snapped of my family curled in the empty ICU waiting room, sweatshirt hoods over their heads. Let me write this: what a hard awful night, and how much worse it might have gone.
….. Then, that morning, in and out with the surgery team, with phlebotomists, nurses. The lymphoma oncology team arrives in a pack. The lead pulls out a chair, tells us to record, and begins talking. He’s brilliant and confident without cockiness in his ability to cure me. He outlines that complications of infection and my bowel will keep me here for the first chemo run, deep into dark December. I decide to do exactly he tells me.
My family again leaves. My daughters refuel with fast-food chicken and sandwiches for their drive. I sleep and wake in a drenching fever, which creates a flurry among the nursing staff. They come in and out. Somewhere in the miasma, I really wake up and decide to pull myself together. I’m going to be here for month, and I need to quit feeling sorry for myself. A nurse tells me to eat some chicken soup with rice — remember Maurice Sendak? The soup is delicious. The fever breaks. I survive a ten p.m. MRI — a blind descent into a cave where dwarfs bang around me while Freddie Mercury sings.
This is a long way of writing a fragment of how I arrived here, medical center land, not a Thanksgiving morning where the kitchen is savory with sage dressing, and I’m out in my boots, admiring the first downy snowfall in my garden. Living is a nonstop risk, the whole she-bang, but we don’t always tread such a thin pinnacle. By chance, as I packed my laptop and socks for the ER trip, I stuffed in the Vermont Almanac that had arrived in that day’s mail. Later, when I had decided to embrace where I am now, I opened the envelope. This volume, as the others, is exquisitely beautiful. A phlebotomist arrived to take blood. She admired the cover — especially the view of the mountains through the window — and she told me a little of her story from rural Vermont to Lebanon, New Hampshire.
In editor Dave Mance’s opening, he writes, now post-election, how we might return to embracing the complexity, rugged and elegant, of the natural world and our very lives. (Gracious, when I’m able to untangle myself from cords, I’ll update with his poetic words from the book just out of reach on the windowsill.:)
Complexity is precisely where I am, enmeshing in this crazy mixed-up jumble of the medical system’s turbo drugs and powerful machinery, the stories of the people who labor here, a nurse training for her first half-marathon and another with three young sons, welcome news of a friend’s first grandchild, my own energetic and loving family.
All of you, too, on this Thanksgiving or perhaps just a plain old weekday morning — in our lives, how much we’ve chosen and so much we haven’t — gratitude for being alive in this world. For chicken soup with rice.
