Sheila and the gong

Yes, Agnes, a week ago I banged the gong with all my strength. The waiting room erupted in applause. When I sat in the chemo chair that day, I was thinking I might not do the gong. It was just me and Robert and the two nurses in my pod. It would be embarrassing. But Sheila took care of that. Sheila is the friendly, highly competent, unempathetic nurse who put in my pick line a year ago, took the pick out after chemo, told me I had really good veins for poking after the nurse in Imaging couldn’t find them, and was now the nurse to give me my very last IV infusion of Herceptin. Appropriate. Thanks, Sheila.

Sheila has a loud, commanding voice, and when she yelled, “We’re ringing the gong!!! Anyone coming?”  she gathered a crowd so big it didn’t fit in the chemo lounge hallway, and we had to move to the outside waiting room. So I had a lot of nurses, and some fellow patients pushing their IV poles, and a number of those waiting in the waiting room, and Robert, and my four good friends who showed up to surprise me, filling the room. Sheila gave me a butterfly sticker (!) to add to the chart (I was number 1042, I think), a tacky poem with terrible rhythm but perfect sentiment, and a short speech.   I gonged. Everyone cheered. I got hugs from all the nurses and all my friends and rode off into the sunset, never to return to that waiting room and that set of people again. I wonder what psychologist taught chemo clinics to send off their graduates with such flourish. I wish to thank her. Because those quick, simple, tacky (a sticker? Most of those patients hadn’t seen a reward sticker in 50 years) rites of passage help us take a deep breath and move on to whatever comes next. It reminds us that everything we experience comes in waves, seasons, stages, and that our job is to turn to the next one at hand.

In C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra, the planet Venus is awash in sweet-tasting seas with myriads of islands floating on the waves. You ride on friendly fish from fibery shore to fibery shore and the land undulates beneath you. You need sea legs for dry land. There is a lady being tempted toward a fall in this landscape, tempted to ignore Maleldil’s one command not to stay overnight on the one fixed land on the planet’s surface. Part of the Temptor’s argument involves rejecting the next wave that is coming and trying to hold on to what has already been. This green Perelandra lady lives in Oz, and her tornado is a watery one that moves her daily to new scenery. Sometimes she wonders what it would be like not to have a life shaped by Maleldil’s waves. We do not want her to know.

Obviously, I have no wish to stay in cancer treatment. That is not a wave I will miss. But I will miss the younger body I had before treatment , and the homes I’ve had (with a farm outside my window; a train track; azaleas; a Bruce trail), the events (a Christmas wedding and three houses full of guests!), good food (Marg’s cooking; peaches every day!), and the friends who saw me through (do you have time for one more round of Quiddler?) I see the dark swirl of the tornado outside my window, and I hold my breath and grab the reins in preparation for another ride. I think of those riding tornadoes of their own: Leslie, Bob, Sam, Evelyn, Caroline, Annette.

These rites of passage are those in-between moments that give us one last chance to catch a breath and grab the reins. We’re not sure whether to whoop or grimace. We do a little of both.