I don't know exactly where or when or how Cindy and Anne became so important. One can assume they were there from the beginning. If not the first day, then certainly one of the days immediately following. It's like that early part of the movie where characters are introduced -- parts being played by unknown faces -- except that you don't yet know who will become the leads and who will fade into the background. Only through repetition will I begin to recognize my primary nurses (only through their constant presence would I be writing this today).
Cindy will arrive in the morning to check my vitals. She will introduce herself. She will smile. Black hair, slight build, strong hands and wrists. She is quick, and professional, and courteous (and, yes, more than a little attractive). She will return a few hours later, more vitals, maybe a bag that needed to be replaced.
She is there almost every morning. She works through the morning and into the afternoon, checking on me every once in awhile.
Anne arrives in the evenings. So much like Cindy in so many ways, yet also so very, very Anne. Red hair, same smallish, slim build, but clearly athletic with those strong arms and wrists and hands (and, yes, also very attractive). More quick to tease me, to rib me, to give me shoot.
There's a shift change -- the baton would be passed -- and Anne would be the one checking vitals and replacing bags and helping with my meds.
This was the routine. Cindy during the day, Anne at night. And even though there would be a third or fourth nurse, working the overnight shift, our interaction would always be minimal. It was brief. I'm sleeping somewhat regular hours, now, and I trust that when I wake each morning, Cindy will be there.
(why is it so hard to write this, now, thirteen years later? why are my sentences so crisp, so detached? why have i suddenly lost the ability to hit the shift key on my keyboard?
i want to be able to show how much cindy and anne meant to me, through repetition, through this cinematic repetition of the same scene over and over again. it's me in bed, looking shoottier and shoottier, losing hair, losing weight, and cindy comes in every morning and checks on me at first with professional courtesy and then later, the more times she comes in, the more times she smiles and laughs and we begin to talk and it's obviously still her job but it's also how friendships are formed because she's always there, this amazingly important constant, except that you can't know that in seven days.
you can't know that when you've been in the hospital for a month and nobody knows for sure that your blood counts are ever coming back, that maybe the chemo was too strong and no bone marrow donor out there, and what? what then? you can't know that when it's really nip and tuck and nothing is going according to plan that this steady constant presence in your life will accost one of your doctors in the hallway outside your room, that she will push him up against a wall, this slight nurse with the strong hands, and she will yell at him you make him better. she will tell you one afternoon, after the danger has passed, that if they'd let you die she would have quit her job. how can you know these things? how can you know how important you'll both become to one another?
you don't know about the fevers, either, the almost daily fevers that will come around the same time, or that you will have become so dependent on her daily presence, the habitual goodness of waking up to find cindy taking your pulse, that those days she took off (she can't work every day you selfish bastard) your fevers would spike higher and harder than any other day. she would come back from her day off and yell at you (gently, teasing) that you shouldn't have gone and done that. the fevers would still linger, but they were milder when cindy was working. we didn't question why.
all of these things.
i mean none of these things.
everything.
cindy was everything and anne was everything but they didn't start out that way. it was slow. it was a slow and steady progression, the way they worked themselves into my life, just like my drip drip dripping chemo. you don't notice it much at first, but the more of it that enters your system, the more you begin to understand that it's having an absolutely, unbelievably important impact. it seems like nothing, really, nothing at all.)
Cindy and Anne were important. As important as the chemo, probably, and the mountains outside the window, and the steady stream of friends and relatives who all lived nearby. Getting better is one part medicine, and nine parts everything else.
(and sooner or later, you -- you, robert k. brown -- will be forced to write about the hard parts in the first person instead of hiding behind the second or third. remember. this happened to you.
f***.
did it again.
this happened to me.
something else to work on: the shaping of this narrative, the changing of is to was, of you to me.)
We are still good friends with the nurse at the neonatal unit who told us when we checked out, "Sh%t, I've been doing this much too long to get attached to a family again."
She brings the kid presents almost every time she visits us, too.
--
I don't know where this is in your writing cycle, but don't get discouraged, you are writing some great stuff.
Thanks, Tim. Hopefully the writing doesn't come across as though I'm getting too discouraged. Frustrated sometimes, yes, but in a way that feels worth sharing.
I realized some time ago that I'm actually trying to accomplish two things with what I've been writing here: document the experience itself, but also some of the challenges of writing about it ten some years later.
That's the reason I left all the internal stuff -- the notes to myself -- in this post. If I was going to limit myself to just writing about leukemia, then it's easy enough to take out all of the parenthetial comments. And maybe in some future not-so-rough draft they will be. They'll stay for now, though, under the pretext of "writing about writing."