Against those facts is also this one: remaining positive and taking life one day at a time is key.  It is also one very good thing you can do to help those around you. There are a lot of ways to reflect a positive attitude: being good to your family, your friends, your caregivers; prayer and good thoughts; showing gratitude – just saying “please” and “thank you” helps bring smiles; engaging in humor, laughing aloud; getting out of the house and enjoying this wonderful world; in other words, living with cancer rather than either dying from it or wallowing in it or acting like a patient who requires constant care because of it. Of course there will be time for dying from it, wallowing in it, and being a patient who does require constant care somewhere down the line, just not yet. Not now. And now is what you have. It is what I have. It is, my friends, what all of us have.

***

So, yes, this new treatment protocol involving the four-letter profanity masking as a five-letter friend is not something I welcome. But neither is it going to defeat me. I love the “now” and those who share it with me too much to let them or myself down. 

Besides, there are still things we want to do and to quote Dr. Suess, “Oh, the places we’ll go!” In fact, San and I went to an information meeting yesterday after chemo about the Summer Abroad program. We met the students who have so far signed up for it and they were a delight. Drs. Belle Edson and Kory Floyd will be teaching too and it is all shaping up to be another grand adventure in London, Dublin, Edinburgh with a few side trips in between – York, Cambridge, Rome, Venice, etc. We are still planning on a spring break trip to one of our favorite places stateside – Plymouth, Massachusetts – and I’m still counting on a trip after that to Ithaca, where my pal Stew works and where he has asked me to speak. Both places have “infusion centers” which is code for a clinic that will provide my weekly chemo treatment, if in fact I still need it. Who knows? Dr. Robin is testing me again after each round and rescanning after three treatments, so it is possible that my blood marker will return to normal and I won’t need more chemo for a while. But hey, if I do, I do.

*** 

But enough about me. Let me tell you a couple of things that also happened yesterday at the clinic – both good.

Remember I went in there with an unexpected level of anxiety and apparently I wore it on my face. Jan noticed it as soon as we went in, Monica called it “tired” but tired was only part of it and she knew that too. Lauren and Ashley and Gerri and Terry were their usual upbeat selves and didn’t comment on it, but I could see the condition of my face reflected in their eyes. 

Now here’s the good part: Within minutes they put me at ease, had me laughing and joking with them, and introduced us to a new patient – Ron – and some of his family who were there to support him. Before ten minutes had passed Ron and his family were also part of the ongoing jollity and we had shared details of our lives and what disease they were treating here. My anxiety was gone. As I have said before, the good people at Four Winds are just plain wonderful human beings. And Ron, even though this was only his second treatment there, said exactly the same thing. 

The second good funny thing happened when Lauren opened my shirt to prep my Power Port for the IV. “I know you are going to laugh at my chest,” I warned her. When she saw what I had done to myself earlier that morning, she did laugh.

Backstory: After each treatment there’s a little blood-letting when the needle is pulled out of the “port.” So Lauren (or Monica) applies a bandage. No biggie, right? But when I remove the bandage at home, it hurts. “Kind of like a wax job,” as Monica put it. To prevent that from happening I have been encouraged to shave the area before I come in. But I always – until yesterday – had forgotten to do that.

“You tried to shave the port!” Lauren cracked up. “You should have shaved the area around it, not the port, silly.” 

She was, of course, correct. What I had done – blame it on anxiety – was to run a razor over the lump that is my port, cutting myself three times in the process. That area of my right breast resembled something that might suggest I had been in a bar fight, one involving me getting stabbed with the business end of a broken beer bottle. The scabs were small but hideous.

“Now I have to find a place to stick you somewhere in the middle of that mess,” Lauren shook her head. And she did. And because she used a larger needle and because she had to insert the needle into virgin port skin, it hurt.

I yelped loudly. I did it mostly for effect. Brought a new round of laughter from everyone, including Ron and his family.

So you see, even though chemo is a four-letter profanity wearing five-letter camouflage (is that a better metaphor than “mask”?) the folks at Four Winds make it relatively painless and punctuate it with fun. The rest of the hour passed like that. Gone was my anxiety. Blood pressure returned to normal.

San took me back to the house, I made a turkey sandwich, and Nic and I watched “The Longest Day” together. This war movie watching is also part of my ritual. I imagine the successful landing on Normandy to be what the army of chemo killers is doing to those mutant protein cells and any other bad guys in my blood system. Yes, we lose a lot of our otherwise healthy boys in the fight, but the cause is noble and there is victory at the end.

***