This
is Nurse Katie. She is a traveling nurse. She worked first in New York City,
and then Denver, Colorado. And now she is in San Diego and has decided to
stop and set roots here. She likes it here. (Mainly because her family is
in Southern California, but good enough reason why to stop the visitational
rotations from chemo ward to chemo ward.) She was good at explaining what
would be happening – the fluid you see her injecting me with was the
first in two applications of chemotherapy entitled Doxorubicin. She told me
my urine would turn red, and sure enough it did. For the whole day. Later,
during the treatment my father stopped in to visit. We had this quiet private
moment but perhaps not so quiet since there were 7 other people in the room.
Him standing near me he said in a very quiet tone, “I like you in your
cancer, you seem so much happier. Before you were always concentrating on
things that made you depressed and sad but now you are not. You are a happier
person today.” And I wasn’t sure how to digest that comment, and
I didn’t even respond other than stutter and create a noise out of throat.
In fact I am not really recalling the response other than the shock of his
statement. Is that really true? Has cancer given me a place of reprieve? Do
I have something to focus on other than what seemed to weigh me down when
in fact those moments were nothing but weightless issues we all seem to think
are important? I guess that is the gift I received for the day – to
realize what is important in life: not the small moments which bog us down
with weighted realities, but rather the larger moments like the gesture of
your father leaning into your ear telling you how lovely you are under the
gossamer of red fluid flowing eagerly down the winding brook of your life.
