Rust

Final radiation treatment today.Yay!  Get to see Dr. Blue & Brown again, too, after three months. I want to ask him why certain parts of my body don’t work right any more. The radiologist says it can’t be his fault since radiation targets one small, (you think so, doc?) concentrated area (and if you kill off one part of the body, of course no other part of the body feels that).

I’ve got my theory all worked out to try out on him: I noticed that the chemo dissolved my fingernails, leaving them milky white and with six distinct ridges, one for each treatment. They will take months to grow back normally. So what if the rust in my joints is something like that, too? What if the chemo kind of turned them to mush a bit, and that mush just needs to work itself out of my system? I’m willing to go with that. I can wait, as long as there’s a promise that life will finally get back to normal some day, and I can bend my thumbs again, and hold a pencil, and chop food, and walk up stairs effortlessly. I’m bargaining. It’s one of those stages of grief.  I have the whole plan worked out.

NEVER DO THAT. Because when the doctor blows holes in your theory, you have nowhere to go. “Your joints are inflamed,” he says. “It happens. No, there’s nothing you can do, nothing you can take, no diet you can go on. Arthritis doesn’t usually go away. It’s not reversible.”

Did he just say arthritis? Am I in the right clinic? What is he talking about? I came to this appointment so he can help me take care of some side effects from the chemo, and he’s adding arthritis to the list of things I have to fight for the rest of my life. He’s so empathetic, and my husband, sitting in the chair in the other corner is no better. Now that the bargaining has fallen through, I’m mad.

Lot of good that does. So I move on to grief. Today was supposed to be a celebration day, my last radiation, and Robert has promised to take me out to dinner, but I’m just sad. After Dr. Blue and Brown, I move to the chemo lounge. A nurse brings my prescription for an estrogen blocker that I am to take for five years. “It may make your symptoms worse,” she says. I’m called to the chemo chair. It’s a nurse I’ve not met before. After that, I walk downstairs to my final radiation treatment. “Good luck! Come back and tell us how things are going,” Dianne says. (She’s good! I’d never think of suggesting such a thing. Would you go back to a clinic to tell the therapists how you’re doing? Arthritis and all?)

One moment of light in the darkness: I am waiting in the chemo lounge for my chair, and a young studious looking woman in dark glasses and long, straight dirty blond hair sits next to me with a clip board.  I’m used to people coming up to me in chemo lounges now, though I’m surprised she’s not wearing the bumble-bee vest of the volunteers. Come to find out, she’s a grad student at Laurier doing her thesis on how the arts help you when you’re a patient at the hospital, and she wants me to be in her experiment. She’s going to put me in a group of other cancer patients and teach us all to play Christmas carols on a ukulele. A ukulele!  I’m going to play a ukulele, dead thumbs and all! I’m excited already. We get to perform at the end of it when she does her final presentation. How cool is that! You’re all invited.

And afterwards Robert and I go to our friends’ house, (we had texted them and asked if we could just come in the evening, and they said yes and saved the day), and while the snow falls in huge flakes outside the window, Michelle and I sit in the kitchen and eat apple pie, and I feel safe to be sad, and she empathizes, and even reminds me, “Doctors can be wrong, you know.” Doctors can be wrong.  Doctor Blue &Brown, please be wrong. And we move to other things (like honeymoons), and the evening ends well. Tomorrow is another day.