RADIATION CLINIC
This part of my story is one I’ll tell. Peg wasn’t there much and it has to do with other patients, mostly. Since I was writing about other people, I can write easier about myself, which was too hard before. I’ll let Peg tell you more later about what happened with me, but now, I’ll tell you about the little family of people at St. Joseph’s Radiation Oncology Clinic, and how Roxanne and Wilda and Vilma and Bonnie looked after all of us, and how we learned from each other and made connections with each other.
They moved me to the floor two days before I was to leave the hospital; I went from the busy high tech intensive care unit to a quiet double room on a regular floor, with no machines, no IV’s, no drains. The empty bed next to mine stayed empty; it was quiet, relatively. I lay in the bed by the window and watched the freeway and looked at the trees, green and full. I could get up, slowly, and make my way around the room and a bit down the hall, to watch. Sometimes I wandered in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and some nice person made me a cup of hot chocolate and let me sit and listen at the nurse’s station. There were the usual comings and goings of the staff, the clinking of trays, the muted ring of the phones, the overhead public address system respectful and unobtrusive.
I lay there surrounded by my icons, the cards with the funny faces and the loving words, my granddaughter’s picture, a rose that Jack had brought from home. I lay there and said many silent ‘thank-you’s to many people. I lay there and waited for the lunch tray, and the aide with the false eyelashes and the big smile to take my vital signs. I stood up and took walks, slowly but surely, up and down the hall, being curious about the other patients. The day passed, the light changed from bright sunlight to dusk to darkness, family and friends came and went, and I felt my back hurt and waited to go home.
The decision was made to do radiation for three weeks; five days a week at 2:15 each afternoon. I met with Vilma in my hospital room the day before I was discharged. Vilma is the head nurse at the Radiation Clinic, tall and strong and handsome. I had met her before when I worked at the UNM Cancer Center, and here we were again, two old friends put into a very different place.
“So, here we are.” She sat quietly, her notebook and calendar on her lap, looking straight at me with a little smile.
“Yes, here we are.” I smiled back, from my hospital bed. “When do we start? Right away I hope.”
She nodded. “Right away. They want to get any odd cells cleared up now.” She looked down at her notes and said “You’ll see the doctor on Thursday, the 18th, and they’ll do the simulation the next day, and start radiation on Monday, and come every day five days a week for three weeks.”
‘Simulation’ is when they put the patient on a machine that is just like the real thing, and they do all the mathematics and physics necessary to figure out the dosage and all the parameters of the radiation. It’s like a dry run, getting everything ready to go. I remembered the ‘sim room’ at the UNM cancer center, and the miles of paper and rows and rows of tiny figures that the physicists wrote up to figure out the dosages. It was all familiar, but not familiar, because then, it was for other people.
I sighed, and said, “OK, let’s do it.” And Vilma gave me a hug and that was that. I lay back on the bed in the quiet afternoon and listened to the noises of the floor, squeaky Nurseshoes and dinner carts and humming X-ray machines. It wouldn’t be easy, driving the thirty or so miles from my home into Albuquerque every day for three weeks, bouncing in a car with my back hurting like it did, but we would do it. Whatever we had to do we would do, like all the other patients in the world.
It looked like any other clinic when I walked in the front door that first day. In the waiting room were racks of brochures about different kinds of cancers, different kinds of radiation and all the side effects. There were some nice chairs and colorful wall hangings around the room; a smiling young lady behind a glass window answered questions quietly. Then I saw the sign on the swinging double door that said “Patients Only Beyond This Point” so I walked through that door and down the hall and it still looked like any other clinic. There were patient exam rooms along the hall, a bathroom, a big room marked “Simulation: Keep Out”. That was my destination today, but I kept walking, and found the little area with the chairs where the patients waited to be taken to the back, with the machines. I carried my blue pillow because it hurt too much to sit in a chair without support for my back.
There were about five people sitting there, all wearing hospital gowns and slacks, talking together. One of them was an elderly lady who wore a cap that looked like a tiny quilt, many different patterns and fabrics. She was thin and wrinkled and lively, gesturing and speaking vividly about the lack of good restaurants in Albuquerque.
”Santa Fe has some good places but they’re all too damn expensive…” she was saying to the group. Several people nodded morosely.
“You got that right.” It was a tall dark gentleman, spare and handsome. I learned later that he had come from Cuba, and he held a fine wooden rosary in his hands, telling his beads quietly to himself. A young Native American girl sat next to him, smiling. She was bald, as was another older lady in the group. The older lady was tall and heavyset, with a mobile intelligent face. She wore glasses with heavy dark frames and her eyes smiled. Next to her sat an old man in a wheelchair, he was long and lanky and wore a heavy old Navajo bolo tie around his neck. It was silver, worked years ago with a fine turquoise stone in the center. On his other side sat a square silent woman dressed in pants and a man’s workshirt, plaiting macramé for a plant holder. In her blunt hands the strands grew and were knotted into patterns, with bright wooden beads intertwined. She smiled as I watched her, and said, “I’m an artist and can’t sit still without doing something. There’s a big blue pot at home that I made for that corner…” she gestured with her head towards a place in the waiting room. “It’s empty, needs something. Plant will do fine. Gives my hands something to do.” She returned to her work, the smile fading, her eyes concentrated on her task, fingers moving rapidly.
I sat down with my pillow at my back, and nodded to the group. On the wall above the little old lady’s head I saw a framed, hand stitched piece of fabric. It said, “When you have come to the edge of all the light that you know, faith is knowing that there will be something solid to stand on or you will be taught how to fly .”
The woman with the glasses started to chuckle. “Here we are,” she said, “All of us unable to eat much of anything except mashed potatoes and gravy or yogurt and canned fruit, and we’re talking about fancy restaurants! I was raised on the East Coast, and believe me, there are some places to eat! When was the last time you went to a restaurant?” She was talking to them all, and all of them laughed.
“Not since I got these marks on my head,” the old man in the wheelchair grinned. “I feel odd walking around in public with them.”
I looked at him and remembered the cancer center clinic where I worked ten years before. They still hadn’t figured out how to put marks that didn’t make targets out of all of us. Then, I was only working and thinking and listening to patients, now I was a part of it. It would be me in a few weeks talking about not being able to eat green chili chicken enchiladas. I remembered how radiation and chemo patients always talked about food, and all the things they couldn’t eat. Joe Romero used to say he couldn’t drink Coors but everything tasted like the Coors can!
The young tech with the long dark hair came out and called my name, and I left my pillow and followed her. I felt eyes on my back, comforting eyes, eyes that knew all about the sim room.
It was a large space, dimly lit. Cabinets lined the walls, shelves above them. In the middle of the room was the machine, standing quietly, waiting for me. It looked like a big x-ray machine, there was a large cone above the table, which was the same old hard metallic stuff an x-ray table is always made of. It had a thin pad covered with a sheet, and there was a pillow at the head. The techs gave me a gown and helped me up to lie on my stomach on the table, which wasn’t easy with my back all stitched and stapled. It took a while, but with patience on their part and perseverance on my part, we got it done. They fiddled with dials and murmured to each other over measurements. Then a gentleman in a white coat came in and talked with them, and then it was finished. Quietly, politely, they showed me to the dressing room and I left, with instructions about returning, and big smiles of greeting and welcome. I was now a part of their day, part of this place, part of the group in the waiting room. My marks weren’t obvious, they lit up my back like a Christmas tree, but they were there. They were hidden by the old nurse uniform top I wore to the clinic, but they were still here. I had become a target, like all the rest. I walked back to the patient waiting room, to collect my pillow, and the lady from the East coast smiled at me.
“You’ll be here Monday, right? We’ll see you then. It’ll be the same crowd then, every day.” She nodded, and said the same thing I remember Joe Romero saying a long time ago. “We’re a family, that’s what it’s like here. A family.” I waved to Vilma on the way out, and took a deep breath. It was new, and not new, familiar and also unfamiliar. I was jumping off into another place, again.
Every day we met, watched each other go to and from the machines; we learned the names of the techs and the nurses, and listened carefully to each other’s stories and symptoms. We were a little band of travelers, all on different places on the road, with hints and tips and clues about the rest of the journey. We needed to listen to each other with care, and share our knowledge of this journey.
One day there was a new patient, a beautiful lady with a strong face, very short gray ‘post-chemo’ hair. She sat down at the very end of the row of chairs and seemed very shy, very hesitant. Helen, the artist, looked sharply at this newcomer and said very clearly,
“You look beautiful with your hair like that.”
The new lady looked startled and stared at Helen, who repeated what she had said and then added, “I’m an artist and I know faces, and bone structure. You have a great face, don’t be bothered that your hair fell out. It looks wonderful.”
There were tears in the new lady’s eyes, and she said “You know, I’ve been so worried for a long time about how I looked. I felt so funny when my hair started to fall out. I couldn’t wear wigs because the matting on them hurt my scalp.” When she said that, several of the women in the group nodded firmly. They understood. “So I wore scarves for a while, but this morning my hands just wouldn’t work to do it right….” She stopped and looked down at her hands, rebellious hands that refused to do what she needed, on this first big day of radiation.
“Of course not, here no one cares how anyone’s hair looks.” Helen said, gruffly. “Here, we’re all the same. Maybe we’ll stand on something solid or maybe we’ll fly, but we’re here together and that’s that.”
And we help each other, I thought silently. All of us, targets all, helped each other. Others did, too, of course, the nurses Roxanne and Wilda and Bonnie were all there, like the techs, to help and support and care for us and give us the best they had. We all saw how they called each of us by name, and never rushed us, as slowly or painfully we walked. But the little band of patients that changed constantly, new people coming and old people going, were the core of the help, the center of the caring.
Every day we met in the waiting room, me with my pillow, Helen with her macramé and her pot; Margaret, the lady from the East Coast with her knitting and the old man, Mr. Castillo, with his rosary. We sat and talked sometimes, and sometimes were silent, quiet with our own thoughts. The journey continued and some of the group finished, the small old lady went back into the hospital and only came down on the bed and smiled at us between the IV poles. She still asked about restaurants and told us to save her a place if we went out. I began to feel the effects of the radiation and had to give up curry and Italian food and green chili enchiladas, but Vilma told me that would change, in a few weeks I would be back to normal as long as I took care of myself now. I felt the fatigue that everyone talked about, and fell asleep on the couch whenever we got back home from the clinic. This new journey continued, and then that part of it was over, for me.
The last day of my treatment came, and we all met in the waiting room one more time. I still had my pillow, and Helen had finished her macramé pot hanger. It hung in the corner and held a big blue pot with a plant the old man’s wife had brought. Helen now was polishing her handmade jewelry, slowly and carefully. Margaret brought a racy novel and winked at me over the top. Roxanne and Wilda gave me a hug and finished up the discharge paperwork and gave me an appointment to see the doctor again in six weeks.
“You’re done, Fink.” Vilma gave me a hug and we sat in her little office. “How do you feel?” and then she laughed at the face I made. “Tired, a little nauseated, yes, I know. Here’s some samples of medication for that, let us know if you need more. All those symptoms will fade in time; in about two or three weeks you’ll be your old self.” And then she gave me a look, a probing nurselook that I had seen many times. Probably done myself many times.
“You are taking care, aren’t you? Resting, not overdoing?”
I grunted. “My back won’t let me do too much; it tells me when to sit down. All I can do is write for a little while and then I’m tired out.”
She nodded. “That’s OK. Do what you want but listen to your body and your mind. Write longhand if you can’t sit at the computer. Let your husband cook; he’ll probably love it.”
I laughed. “He does, and he’s doing all the grocery shopping, too.”
I stood up and we said goodbye, and I waved down the hall to my little band of travelers, and walked slowly out the double doors and into the main waiting room, where all our relatives and friends waited. There was Jack, reading Moby Dick , waiting for me. He brought the car around while I sat on the bench in the sunlight, bracing my back with the pillow, and we drove home, not saying much. This was another part of the journey, after all. More familiar, but part of the journey all the same.