NOT LIKE THE OTHERS

The uneasiness has not yet disappeared, and I am not sure that it ever will… 

Each check-up, swollen lymph-node, or random bruise jolts my nervous system into high-alert. As I get farther away from my transplant date, submerging myself even deeper into “Society,” each doctor’s visit continues to rip open the scars of uncertainty. The walls of security I have been attempting to lay brick-by-brick  for the past two years crumbles in increasing speed as I get closer and closer to the examination table. The mortar was never quite as sturdy after diagnosis. 

Half-way through the hour-long drive to my appointment, my synapses fire and illuminate the memories of prior appointments. We have made this drive before. However, the rocking of the car as it hits the various cracks in the road now leaves us worried about tire alignment rather than the alignment of my mouth with a throw-up bag.

I am able to stave off the beasts of negativity that paw at the edges of my confidence until we reach the Cancer Center. I will be ok. As my Mom and I get out of the car, I wonder if the parking attendants can tell which one of us is the patient. It was obvious before. My back hunched at the weight of my bare head. The raised outline of my exposed chest catheters. I was not like the Others.

Where I once shuffled across the Cancer Center’s entryway, I now take long strides. The pants that were once baggy now cling to my hips and thighs. The ghostly voice of my previous eating disorder softly calls in my ear, attempting to fill me with premature guilt for the progress we’ve made. The nagging voice is drowned out as I walk past the wall of people in the car pick-up line.

I stand tall above the countless wheelchairs that offer assistance to more than half of those waiting for whichever chariot will whisk them away from more bad news or scan orders. For a moment I see figments of my previous self seated amongst the group. Frail, broken, wanting to go home. 

I clutch my Independence a bit tighter as I walk through the familiar doors, no longer the only one wearing a mask for my protection. No longer wrapped in jackets and beanies in 80-degree weather. I am not like the Others.  

As I check into the BMT clinic, the Receptionist who has greeted us warmly for the past three years furrows her brow and asks for my name, unable to recognize me from behind the mask and full head of hair. My stomach sinks a little. I know the mask doesn’t help, but I no longer feel like a “regular” at the place that served as a second home for the better part of two years.

The clinic has seemingly moved on to more pressing patients, but I am not sure if I have moved on with it. Memories linger in every corner of this room like ghosts. I recall where I sat for my first BMT appointment. Where I staved off nausea before my second infusion. Where I waited to be rebuilt in more ways than one.

My Mom and I take a seat, noting how much quieter it is due to Covid protocols. I look to the check-in desk and scan the room, attempting to assess how many patients are ahead of me. Old habits. I don’t recognize any of the check-in personnel, another reminder that the world has continued on. When my time comes, I offer my wrist to the New Face at Desk 2, struggling to hold up the crumbling facade of “OK-ness.”  

As I am banded by the Bouncer of Blood, the final bricks from what I had been building (for the umpteenth time) over the past 6 months evaporate. My poker face barely holding on, saved by the fact that now only my eyes need to sell my fake sense of security. I breathe a bit harder through my mask and allow the lens fog to cover up what my soul cannot. 

Now, only a bracelet gives me away as the patient. I play with it on my wrist, and it reminds me that I am 28-yrs-old. I remember when it read “25”… and then “26”… and then “27.” Most people have old movie tickets in their keepsake boxes as reminders of years past. I have various medical memorabilia.

As my name is called from the Nurse’s Station, I stand up and walk through the doors that have transported me into immense fear, joy, and confusion over the past few years. It is lost on me that I am not light-headed from the sudden shift in altitude. Today I have forgotten where I came from. 

The lead Nurse, a trainee when I was a “regular,” asks how I have been. A question that is just vague enough to hide whether or not they do remember me. “Doing well!,” I say, perhaps a bit too eagerly, as if maybe we’ll go get a coffee to catch up after we get through the blood formalities. 

They motion to the scale. I take off my shoes, jacket, and empty my pockets, not wanting to give that semi-dormant voice in my head even more impetus to awake. I look anywhere but the number, hoping the Nurse doesn’t announce how much weight I have or haven’t gained since our last visit. The scale beeps, content with the amount of space I take up on this Earth. Numbers are jotted down, nothing is said. We are safe for now, the voice can continue to sleep. 

I offer my index finger as the Nurse wraps the blood pressure cuff around my arm. I still know my way around a vitals collection…My fingers gently pull my mask below my chin as I offer the underside of my tongue for the thermometer. We’ve come a long way since my first time, when I pulled my mask over my eyes to allow the Nurse access to my mouth…(We laughed.)

We walk over to the collection room where the Nurse will harvest my blood. I hop in the chair, quickly unzipping my port shirt and wiping the Emla cream from my chest. The skin tingles from where the numbing cream sat all morning.

I make small talk, hesitating before I ask how the Nurse has been doing. The New York Times has filled in many of the blanks as to how the medical industry has been lately…The Nurse cracks open the alcohol applicator and the familiar smell punctures my mask. My heart starts beating a bit faster as the scratchy sponge trails the cold liquid over my port site. 

After a few moments pass, and the alcohol has evaporated from my skin, the Nurse begins the count down from three before plunging the syringe into my port. I exhale as I feel nothing, the nerves fast asleep. I try to relax, something one of my earlier nurses explained is important for easy blood return. 

No return. The Nurse begins pumping the syringe in hopes of breaking through the hold, the catheter in my neck quivering with each injection of hope and withdrawal of disappointment. Still nothing. I turn my head to the side. Pro tip from a different Nurse two years back. 

“When was the last time this was flushed?,” I am asked. 

“Uhh, a month or so ago?” (Give or take two months…)

I am prepared to stand up, a suggestion from a third Nurse I had early on in my treatment, but we finally get a return. I try to act cool, breathing away the flurry of dizziness that was starting to cull around the periphery of my brain. Hello Anxiety, my old friend. 

“You doing ok?”

The question that always left me with more anxiety. My brain ignites for one final spin, the edges of the room darkening a bit. 

Shit. I inhale. The spinning slows enough for me to nod my head and give a shallow, “Uh huh!” 

After three years you’d think this would be easy. 

The Nurse seals me up and sends me back through the doors to the waiting room. My Mom looks up as I approach, asking if everything went alright. We’ve had faster blood draws in previous visits…

“Just a sticky port.” 

My Mom suggests that maybe I should get it flushed more than once every three months.

“Yeah.” 

I know I won’t. 

I brought my backpack with me to do work, but I look around instead, observing those who came before and after me. 

The familiar muffled sounds of HGTV take off the slight edge of fatigue and anxiety that fills the room. The lady two chairs over holds her husband’s banded hand tightly, as if it is all she has and is about to lose.

The man across the room nods off, his nervous wife looks around uneasily. They are called into the conference room reserved for social worker visits. The room where I was asked if I had a last will and testament and encouraged to prepare one. I am not like the Others. 

Phones ring, the office’s holiday tree is now adorned with shamrocks for the month of March, life moves on. We are called back and led to examination room 2b. The room where my stem cell treatment all began. Only my Mom is with me this time. They don’t need to drag in extra chairs from the hallway for the rest of my family. 

But there I sit, waiting for the Nurse to come in and rattle off the list of 10 pills I used to take but have yet to say that I no longer do. I’m not sure why I don’t correct them. Maybe it’s fear that the minute they are removed from my chart is when they’ll be added back on. Maybe I cling to my identity as “Patient” and all that comes with this title. Maybe I forgot what it means to not have a pharmacy as a nightstand.

My Mom and I fill the time with crossword puzzles. 

“1970 Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young album?” 

Mom fills in the blanks effortlessly. 

“Huh,” I say curiously as I look at the answer.

Before I can admire the poetry of the moment too much, the handle jiggles a millisecond before the door opens, disrupting the vacuum of calm anticipation that had fallen thickly over the room. 

A peppy Nurse I’ve never met before (we’ll call her Joy), walks in and introduces herself. This is beginning to feel like the fourth season of a spin-off series.

Joy asks how I’ve been and eagerly takes notes. The exchange is much shorter than it used to be. I no longer have chemo-induced hives or insomnia to inquire about. I merely work long hours and eat a lot of ice cream. My issues read like a headline for US Weekly rather than a CVS receipt. I am not like the Others. 

Joy nods sympathetically as I talk about work. I try to keep the venting short, again thinking back to the New York Times articles. She collects her notes and says the doctor will be right in. The thick blanket of anticipation settles back over the room with the sharp click of the door handle behind Joy. 

“Eggs for fertilization…three letters…” my Mom reads aloud, shifting the focus away from the impending results and back to the black and white checkerboard. 

“Ova,” I offer. My mom nods as she fills in the blanks.  

“Speaking of, has the fertility clinic sent this year’s bill for your egg storage?,” my Mom asks.

“Not yet.”

I am not like the Others. 

Each minute that passes by waiting for the Doctor to arrive sinks my stomach a little further as if it was an internal game of Battleship and my immune system has already taken out my freighter. We have been here before. There’s a certain assumption that you won’t be seen on time. The ill outnumber the saviors. 

But after a certain threshold of tardiness, your prognosis starts dipping. Once a delay in visitation has been caused by your failing immune system, you will always assume this is the case, even if it is because of someone else’s failing immune system… or merely bad traffic. 

We are connected in more ways than we often realize, us Cancer Patients. Connected through the unspoken understanding of what it’s like to look at ourselves in the mirror each morning, to stare into our sunken eyes and pale scalps. Connected through the communal assumption that we all have contributed way too many medical ID bracelets to various trash heaps and memory boxes. Connected by the fact that one medical hiccup in our daisy-chain of neighboring appointments ultimately triggers a prolonged day for the next patient.  And so the dominos tip.

Yet, for an experience that binds us beyond words, we still often feel so alone. We are not like the Others. 

Those who love us profoundly do not completely understand (unless they have unfortunately been handed a diagnosis themselves).  They see, they witness, they pray. They get close. But they fortunately do not share the full gamut of our mental wear. They have their own mental hills to climb, hills that presented themselves when we were inducted into this warped club. Yet, I’m not sure if they can fully understand the hesitancy in making plans we share or how even in moving forward, we continue to look over our shoulder, ensuring the Beast remains dormant for another day. We are simultaneously running from our diagnoses and relapses while chasing a time that seems to have picked up the pace from when we were last “Normal.” When mortality was not thrown in our faces.

Our ignorant lens is shattered in diagnosis. We are made painfully aware of the fragile glass box we had existed in up until that defining moment of our lives. The light no longer bends around what we seem to only discover in old age and tragedy, and instead rests squarely upon the facade of fragility. We now more clearly see the thin line upon which we all delicately balance. 

While we attempt come to terms with this fractured lens, we are forged in chemical fire in an effort to fuse what was shattered. And if we are lucky, we can one day inhale deeply, our lungs filling with the air of the shifting seasons as our futures broaden beyond the next few hours, days, weeks…

We are not like the Others. 

I now understand what it means for the young to feel immortal, since I no longer do. 

Remission has left me split between two selves. The Patient who did the heavy lifting to get us to this point, whose physical suffering has ended and should celebrate. And the Survivor, who has been handed a second chance and is unsure of what to do with it.  The Patient had a clear directive, to Survive. The Survivor must develop their own. Once you fight for one more breath, what do you fight for next? 

“Dinglehopper?,” my Mom reads aloud. 

“Fork.” 

With each appointment, a jagged fragment of me wants to be told that I have relapsed. I can’t shatter from what I desire.

I no longer trust my body, so my mind invites the tragedy before someone else can. Fool me once…

Yet, the much larger part of myself fears what the odds say I may face again. A mere inflection or trailing inquiry about my lymph nodes and night sweats has me gripping the armrest of the examination table tighter than I would normally. (I feel Unremarkable. Right? This is what Unremarkable feels like. I hope this is what Unremarkable feels like.) 

We’ve been remarkable for so long that we’ve forgotten what it means to feel “normal.”

There is a silent resilience to being in remission that places you in the grey. You are expected to move on, as if you are a butterfly that needs to prove there was some transitory reason you were one of the lucky few chosen for this fight. As if you have two pairs of wings to pick from during your cancer treatment: the pair you discover after awaking from a deep sleep and the pair you are only awarded if you never wake up. 

I spread my newfound “wings,” only to realize that I never learned how to fly. I tell myself that I cannot complain, since I have gone through things worth complaining about. So I remain in the shadows, observing and noting. Trying to subdue the voices of frustration for being where I am, knowing that where I am is a gift.

“Beloved fairytale by J.M. Barrie?,” my Mom offers. 

“Peter Pan?” 

The handle of the door jiggles slightly before the door opens to begin my Doctor’s visit.

I inhale deeply as my Mom and I look at each other. She squeezes my hand. 

I am not like the Others.