You're Not In Remission

My room has become very homey. Cards and letters are pinned to a one of two large corkboards opposite my bed, just below the TV. There's a Far Side calendar on the right-side corkboard. I've been using a big indelible ink marker to cross out the days. I haven't so much been drawing a big X across the blank days, as I've actually scribbled out the numbers themselves. It's as if the days are not only past, but that they never existed in the first place. You can't read the numbers unless you get up real close. You need to squint to decipher what's underneath the permanent ink.

There is a row of already opened bottles of pop on the small shelf that separates the two boards. Big bottles, two liters, all completely flat. My nutritionist had explained to the family that chemo would have an adverse affect on my appetite, and that drinking cold carbonated beverages might make the nausea worse. So Mom stopped by Safeway on her way to visit one afternoon, and had picked up several two-liter bottles of Dr. Pepper, Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew. A sample pack. I didn't know if I would even be able to taste the pop, so she picked up a variety. She lined them up on the shelf. She wanted them to be good and flat by the time I'd lost my appetite.

What I could taste of them tasted like crap. Flat lukewarm pop, whether you've been getting chemo or not, is something that just doesn't belong in anybody's system. The bottles stayed on the shelf, though, caps on, not getting any colder or more carbonated, on the off chance that I might suddenly like them in the weeks ahead.

There are no flowers. Too risky, what with the way my immune system is behaving.

The room is kind of a mess. Not dorm room messy, with books and pens and loose change all over every available space on my desk, posters on the wall, dirty laundry piling up in my wardrobe, but a kind of lived-in, I've been in a hospital room for three weeks kind of messy.

A few mylar baloons drift lazily near the ceiling. The more comfortable chairs remain lined up against the window. Mom has brought one of the folding chairs next to my bed. Close. She's being doing this for awhile now, staying close, holding my hand when I sleep. Sometimes we don't talk at all. Sometimes I'll do that thing I used to do when I was much younger, pretending to be asleep in the back seat of our old red Cutlass Supreme, my head nodding realistically with the motion of the road.

She cries a lot, sitting in that narrow folding chair, holding my hand. She will be sobbing and I won't know what to do or say. I will want to apologize, even though I know doing so will makes her sobs rack harder, feeling guilty that I'm feeling guilty. And so on. So I'll do that thing, that thing I did when I was a kid. I'll end up drifting off anyway. So exhausted. An easy step. Pretending, sleeping, what's the difference?

Dr. Collins has been talking for a little while. She has been explaining the results of my aspirate.

"We're looking for a number," she says. She is standing in the middle of my room. When she is on her rounds, she will be flanked by several other doctors, young, diligently writing notes with tiny, almost invisible pens on equally tiny, imperceptible scraps of paper. Today she is alone.

"We don't need to get into too much in the way of details here, Robert, unless you want to. The number itself doesn't really matter. It's a reflection of the percentage of leukemic blasts that still remain in your system, right? It's meant to provide us with a level of confidence that the leukemia has been eradicated. This is what we're looking for with this aspirate."

I'm not so perky anymore. My days are long and slow and draining. I can't think of anything funny to say. No snappy retorts that demonstrate how brave I'm being, or how I'm concerned but, you know, not too concerned. I'm tough. I'm tough as nails. Instead of the funny energetic guy who laughs in the face of danger, I have become the silent warrior nodding quietly to the good doctor.

"So."

"So."

"So this number that we've been looking for, well, we didn't find it. You still have too many blasts in your system. You still have leukemia. You're not in remission."