Pimento Sandwiches

On Chemo Week

Dear Friend,

We’ve settled into a rhythm. Labs every other week. Scans and doctor visits every other month. Chemo one week in four. This is the way it’s likely to go until I complete twelve rounds of maintenance chemo or until something changes. Change is all but guaranteed, and the medical strategy is to delay change as long as possible. This is how we do it:

1. labs

2. labs

3. chemo

4. labs

5. labs

6. chemo

7. labs

8. scan

9. doctor

(repeat)

This is not an onerous cycle. I feel well, and there is plenty of time to walk in the morning, to read, to write, and to be still enough to notice when the gates to heaven crack open, if only a little. Still enough that the thin places can find me. And they find me. Not every day. But they do find me.

And maybe I need to say this out loud. None of it is my own doing. It’s funny, but it’s often precisely when I stop my own doing that they find me. It’s 100 percent grace. Each time a legitimate miracle, an icon, pointing toward the divine. Remembering Merton: I have no program for this seeing. It is only given.

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This week six. Chemo week. Or it was chemo week. I wrapped up Friday night. Next step is labs in two weeks.

I still feel funny claiming credit for chemotherapy. Abi’s chemo experience (we need better words, don’t we?)…Abi’s chemo treatments looked far different than mine.

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Abi would go to the lab to have blood drawn Monday morning. She would walk over to Dr. McGaughey’s waiting room and chat with the receptionist for a moment then sit with John in the little cubicle off to the side  - the one with the stuffed brown leather couch. They would check to see if the magazines on the coffee table had been updated (they had not) and look for things to laugh about, which she and John usually found. And when they did not find something worthy of a belly laugh, they would slip together into this Swedish Chef voice/language that nobody else could understand and they would laugh together at whatever they were saying until Abi would have laugh-tears running down her cheeks.

This is the precise moment the receptionist would inevitably call Abi’s name, and she and John would try to compose themselves as we were led back into the examination room. The nurse took vitals and asked the same questions as last time and finally said, “The doctor will be in shortly” and pulled the door closed behind her, and the pent up laughs would come pouring out of them and Abi would struggle to find her breath. So would John.

After Dr. McGaughey came and chatted about wine and cancer - our normal routine, and seriously, he would leave for his next patient, John would head to work, and Abi and I would go to the infusion room. She would sit in the chair nearest the hummingbird feeders that some brilliant person had stuck to the giant windows and some angel filled with fresh nectar every night.

How did Abi end up in that particular chair every treatment?  Certainly one of the nurse’s had broken all sorts of protocol by reserving it for her because he knew it was her favorite place to sit and he, like all the infusion nurses, loved her. Sometimes things are just that simple. 

The room was almost always full. Full of people connected to pumps and lines. Full of the rhythmic sounds of pumps pumping, and then beeps beeping to alert the nurses that the pumps had completed their pumping. And together we would sit there. For hours. Five days in a row. Talking. Reading. Sleeping. Laughing. Eating pimento sandwiches.

The infusion room was not a joyful place, at least in the way we normally think of joyful. But it was always bursting of with-ness. There was a community there. These beloved people shared something unfathomably difficult but also something indescribably precious. Most of the people shed their masks before they came into the room. (I’m not talking about N-95s, but the other mask almost all of us almost always do wear, and almost always have worn out in public our entire lives - beginning long before the pandemic.) The conversations among the patients and the staff were usually muted, but unmistakably intimate. There would be a break in conversation when the hummingbirds arrived. Even those who sat quietly by themselves, I want to believe, were not rejecting the with-ness of this sacred place but were savoring it, cherishing it, surrendering to it with their stillness. 

Am I romanticizing this? Perhaps, and it was certainly not all Enya and day lilies. Some days it rained. Sometimes the hummingbirds stayed home. Some days the room was so cold and the blanket heater wasn’t working. There were heartbreaking medical emergencies and some days people simply stopped showing up.  Some days one of the nurses would accidentally let some of the darkness from the outside world sneak in behind him or her, and it would drift around the room for a while, usually until the volunteers arrived with pimento sandwiches and homemade cookies and they shooed the darkness away. 

But there was always grace and there was always intimacy and there was always, with apologies to Milan Kundera, this unbearable lightness of being with. It was almost as if one was always at risk of floating away to a place whose beauty defied words. Defied even poetry. It was the thinnest place I have ever been. Not even close.

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Chemo week for me looks different. No doctor’s appointments. I don’t do daily labs and I don’t sit in a treatment room attached to a pump for hours and hours. I don’t even have a port. I just pop a zofran, and forty minutes later swallow a handful of temozolomide capsules, turn off the light, say a prayer, kiss Kathryn good night, and fall asleep. Aside from chemo brain and an occasional headache, I don’t have any real side effects. Every single thing about my chemo experience is objectively easier than what Abi experienced, and I am sincerely grateful for the researchers who figured out a way to give treatment to cancer patients in the least burdensome way possible. I only wish she could have had it as easy as I do. 

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And yet. I don’t want to ignore the beauty of the with-ness that Abi (and I) experienced over those months in the treatment room. Sometimes, I think, it is easy for me to take an experience into my arms, hold it close for just a moment, and decide whether or not it sparks joy. If it does spark joy, and quickly, then I fold it up neatly and put it in the front of my memory drawer where it’s easy to find just in case I need a shot of joy at some point, because I will definitely need a shot of joy at some point. Of course. 

And if it does not spark joy immediately, then I fold it up and set it aside to donate to Goodwill. 

What if I gave it all, and I mean all of it, a little more time. Made fewer snap decisions. Held those experiences in my arms a bit longer before pronouncing judgment. I can’t help but wonder how much joy I may have tossed in the donate pile over the years, simply because I was a little impatient. Because I could not or did not allow enough time for the tiny germ of a spark of joy, indescribably precious and gasping for breath, to emerge from the unfathomably difficult. 

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When I look back on this post, it’s tempting to resolve not only to make fewer snap decisions, but also to find an organization with whom I might volunteer and deliver pimento sandwiches and chase away darkness. Nothing wrong with that. 

But I wonder if it misses the bigger point. Maybe we don’t have to be in an infusion room to experience that thinness, at all.  Maybe the thinness is all around us looking for an opening. Waiting for us to find the courage to take off our masks, invite the person right next to us to do the same, to see them, and not to look away. Maybe it doesn’t take an infusion center. Maybe all it takes is the one person that, in an answer to someone’s prayer - yours, theirs, someone else’s - God has placed in your path and invited you to love as your neighbor.  Maybe thinness finds us more easily when we accept that invitation. When we get out of the way and let our yes get a large as it longs to be. Not in grand gestures of generosity, but in tiny little gestures of with-ness. Tiny little gestures of hope and tiny little gestures of joy.

Oremus,

Chris