Seven Days

Your first week on chemo is a few different things at the same time. On the one hand, there's little to no pain. The chemicals don't burn. You can't feel them ripping apart your veins or anything. They're just these diligent workers, tiny, unseen, coursing through your body, on these myriad important search and destroy missions.

You're not required to do anything. You are being waited on hand and foot, it seems, meals brought to you on trays, placed quietly on the far table if you're sleeping, rolled right up over the adjustable bed if you're awake. You've got the TV set. You managed to convince your parents to bring your Nintendo into the hospital room because when you're not being waited on hand and foot, or watching television, or watching clouds raining outside your window, you'd like something else to pass the time.

This is one of the other things. Since you're not actually doing anything -- getting all these tests done for you, people smiling and helpful, hand on the small of your back, helping you onto the scale, or the gurney, or the wheelchair, helping you to the bathroom, to the shower, down the hall (if you have enough strength), all these helping hands helping everywhere -- much of the time you spend alone and awake is an exercise in extreme boredom.

You absolutely positively do not want to let your imagination wander. You can imagine all sorts of things. When it's two in the morning and you're now wide awake because your body clock is all kinds of backward -- light in the darkness, darkness when you're expecting light -- and there's nothing on TV, and the visitors are long gone, you are more than capable of imagining the worst of the worst.

So you just don't. Focus on school in the fall. Focus on getting through the next day, on whatever it will bring.

Which is another thing: you are so unbelievably lucky.

You're getting your chemotherapy in probably one of the handful of best hospitals for this sort of thing in the entire country, and it just happens to be where you grew up. Word spreads. People know. Close family friends are the first to visit. They smile and wash their hands at your sink before approaching carefully, hugs and handshakes. We're well past commenting on how much bigger/older/mature you look since the last time we saw you. We're not always happy on these visits, but different people will look at you with different eyes.

Your close friends also visit, almost immediately, and everybody does an excellent job of pretending like there's nothing to worry about. Circles of friends. It expands. People you maybe haven't kept in touch with over the years will find out. They, too, will be worried, and will want to visit. You will need to catch up on the good old times. Carefully, and with increasing skill, you will dance around the difficult questions.

Nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here. Move along.

At the end of a week you will be surprised that your time is both empty and filled. Everything, it seems -- chemo, vomiting, fevers, visitors, helping hands -- is at once bad and good, energizing and exhausting.