The Poet with His Face in His Hands (Mary Oliver) and The Winged Energy of Delight (Rainier Maria Rilke)

I parked my car and walked through last Friday's blizzard, across the street and between the buildings and into the medical school.  The place was quiet, as for the first time in my memory, the university and medical school were closed due to weather; therefore, all non-essential personnel were not required to be at work.  Friday, I was entirely non-essential, but I had a doctor's appointment and then my second round of chemo scheduled, so I continued to walk through the building and out the other side into the parking garage toward more essential personnel.  From here, I walked outside and across the street to the entrance to the hospital.  All in all, this is about a 10 minute walk. I walked in, got onto an elevator to the 6th floor cancer center, and hopped directly into the registration queue.  Here's the thing.  Whether you are at the front or the end of the line, you will wait until one of the unhappy employees looks up and invites you forward.  I have been doing this for years now, and I am  slowly losing my "good patient-ness".  I wonder why we still don't understand that the patient is the client here.  Really, how hard should it be to say, "I'll be right with you", I wonder?  Oh well, I really don't understand it, but there it is.  I move from there to the waiting room where I sit and wait for the MA to come out and yell, "McKinley!".  You know, it is hard enough to ride up to the 6th floor and just get out of the elevator, but this, this really burns me.  I am very proud of myself, however, because I actually told the MA that I found it really hard to be referred to this way and could she please consider using both the first name and the last, or saying "Ms McKinley", or PERHAPS ACTUALLY SAYING "LISSA" OR "DOCTOR MCKINLEY", since I have been a patient in this cancer center for 14 years. You know, if I feel this way, consider how the unempowered, system-naive new cancer patient must feel in this setting.

Ok, I say all this because when I actually get into a room and interact with the nurses, nurse practitioners, and doctors, I have the best team and absolutely world class care--every time, every year, always.   But the initial interface is often not easy for me.  Anyway, there I am in a room finding out how I'm doing and whether my dose of drug will be lowered a bit to avoid the 2 weeks of mouth sores, and the nurse comes in to tell me that my mother-in-law is in the next room because her blood counts were low after starting radiation therapy for a very difficult, new cancer diagnosis. I finish my visit and walk back out into the waiting room on my way to the treatment side of the cancer center.  Sitting in the waiting room is my mother-in-law looking little and a little lost.  I had been told that  she was ok, but that she would be getting a blood transfusion before going home to help her regain her energy and breath. So, what's the first thing I say to her when I see her in the waiting room?  I say, "Nancy, I'll see you on the other side."  Ok, perhaps the words were ill-chosen, but I just meant the other side of the cancer center!  She says she'll see me there, and  I walk to the treatment side and am put in a room to wait for an IV and a series of infusions.  You never know who will be your room-mate here, but this time, I am put in a room with a lovely woman getting chemo for a new diagnosis of breast cancer.  We're a dime a dozen up here, that's for sure.  We both talk, we both wait, I try not to scare her and I avoid telling her much of my history.  she tells me how much she likes my hair.  I tell her how much I like her scarf, and how exciting it sounds to be almost done with chemo and getting back to her life.  She is lovely, and very much looking forward to getting back to teaching disabled kids in inner-city Cleveland.

So as we wait some more, a lovely nurse I have known for years slips an IV into my vein and starts the first infusion. Then she gets me juice and a cup of soup and ice packs for my hands and feet to help stop the hand/foot symptoms.  She also suggests that I eat ice chips throughout the infusion to help prevent the mouth sores.  All this ice makes for a very chilly several hours!  After the first of the short infusions before the main infusion, I wander the treatment rooms trying to find my mother-in-law.  I find her asleep in a chair in a busy treatment room getting the first of two units of blood.  Again, she looks so little in the big chair.  she awakens and says she is doing ok, but she isn't quite clear about why she needs the blood.  While I'm not either, we talk a little about what the potential causes might be and we agree to meet again in another hour or so.  I wander back to get my final fruit punch-colored infusion and a new room-mate.  This time, two guys come in .  The patient is a man in his 30's with I don't know what cancer, but he's having a terrible side effect of pain in his eyes, and he is unable to look at the light or open one eye.  His brother has accompanied him and sits in the corner and begins to knit.  I recognize that the patient is in significant pain and I don't engage him after saying hello, but I talk some to the knitter.  He is a new knitter, and I am an old one, so we have a language to share anyway.  He is funny and kind, and over time, the patient begins to interject and joke a bit.  I loved watching the brothers kid each other and obviously care about each other.

And now here comes my lovely husband.  He is a physician in this hospital and knows everyone here (unlike me-- a physician in an affiliated hospital).  I try to imagine what he must be dealing with at the moment.  I can really only imagine his pain as he has his mother with a terminal cancer in one room  and his wife getting chemo in another.  How surreal is this situation anyway?  We agree that his mother really is the one who needs his company right now, and I agree to call him when i'm done. And I sit back and think about how completely weird our lives are, and yet how remarkably normal most of the time.  I think this is living at the edge; I certainly feel on the edge sometimes.  Actually, sometimes I think we are standing on one leg, wobbling over the abyss.  Seems to me we have a choice here, or maybe it isn't really a choice at all. We can either figure out how to embrace the situation and move forward,  or we can just fall over.  Not much of a choice, anyway.  I vote for the first option.  From this edgy vantage point, I thank my lucky stars for every single day, and that's not such a bad perspective.to have.  What about a poem or two after this long and rambling note.  I am being just a little lazy and picking two that have winged their way to me over the internet lately.  Enjoy!

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need anymore of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

~ Mary Oliver ~

The Winged Energy of Delight

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions ... For the god
wants to know himself in you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~