Could Be Worse

Either Cindy doesn't share much additional information with me, or I've forgotten it over the years. Susan is in her mid-thirties. She was in an accident of sorts, and has been in a coma for at least several months. She doesn't respond to anything -- light, noise, proximity of family members. I assume she must be getting her food the same way that I am, not that either of us can taste anything anyway. Nutrients from a bag, dripping into a tube. It doesn't sound like she's in critical condition; they have a separate ward for that. She still needs a great deal of personalized care, attention to details, but she's not hanging by a thread.

My bed faces the wall that separates our two rooms. It's easy to stare at it, easy to stare at that wall and just let the view blur and fade to black.

I've been starting to get more fevers lately. They spike pretty high. 104, 105, 106. Something like that. One minute I will be so unbearably hot that Mom and Cindy will be constantly replacing cool towels on my chest and forehead. Then it will swing and I'll be so cold that my body shakes. Warm blankets will be brought in, stacked three or four deep on top of me while I'm curled in a fetal position. Knees touch my chin. Cindy brings in the demoral, plunges it into my Hickman. It doesn't take long before my muscles relax and the chills go away.

Everything gets fuzzy.

I stretch out my legs and stare at the wall.

My face is starting to get numb.

I try not to think about things too much. If I start thinking about the details then I'll be able to find all sorts of things to worry about. The fevers are a little scary. They're not terrible, but they keep coming back, and they do worse things to my body than the nausea. Where are they coming from? When will they stop? What if there's an infection someplace really bad, like my lungs, or my brain...

See. This is exactly why we need to stop thinking about everything so much. What ifs don't help at all.

The demoral cuts the edge. I'm blinking in super slow motion, like a super slow-motion super hero. My eyes are ballistic. Eyelids shut with a slam. Everything goes dark. BAM! Open again. The wall is still there. My feet poke out from underneath a pile of blankets. You can't handle this, these eyelids of super-slowness. They slam shut again. They are heavy. I'm just blinking, but it's slower than anything you can imagine.

I don't have to think. I don't have to think about anything when my eyes are closed in the dark.

But it doesn't stop me from doing it anyway.

My eyes sweep open, running a quick status check. Lines are still plugged, blood is still pumping, stomach is neither happy nor unhappy. All systems are okay. Not great, but not terrible, either.

Could be worse.

Man.

This is what my grandfather -- Mom's dad -- always used to say. Ask him about anything. Ask him about the stockmarket, the Mariners, weather in Portland, or the steak dinner -- always well done -- he'd picked his way through. How was it, Grandpa? How are you doing?

"Could be better, could be worse."

Of course it could be better. That's an easy answer: let's go back in time six weeks or eight weeks or something and poof! Magic wand. No leukemia. But that's not very likely. We've got to play with the hand we were dealt.

But it could always be worse. I could be dead, first of all, which I'm not. But even more than that, today will never be as bad as the other days. Today's not bad. Today is okay. But there was that one time, a week or so ago? Puking then was much worse than it is now. And, wow, I can't imagine spiking a temp as bad as that one a few days ago. Look at my arms: I'm not even bleeding anymore. That was bad. We don't push the logical problems with this -- that the worst days couldn't all be in the past. I'm sure I would have been able to find something else that was worse than the bleeding. Aliens could have shot out of my stomach. Something.

I'm not losing any limbs to the cancer, which would definitely be much worse than what I'm experiencing. Leukemia doesn't spread, or metastasize, or need to be operated out. I know that I don't want to go under the knife. What if I needed to have my leg amputated just below the knee? I've seen other patients with other cancers. I feel bad. I feel bad that their cancer is so much more visible than mine. Tumors that need to be cut out, body parts that need to be discarded.

I might still be in England, far from home, with no visitors coming in and out every day. Mom told me that Pan Am had the right to refuse the second flight, because of my reaction to blood on the first. She'd been working out different angles while I slept in London. Friends of friends from Boeing to the military and we had some kind of backup -- some kind of trans-Atlantic military transport. But even that could have fallen through. What then? The protocol would have been the same, I'm sure, but I'd still be a stranger in a strange land, wishing I was somewhere else. No good could come of two weeks of chemotherapy working against a lonely, homesick heart.

Cindy and Anne might not have cared about me as much as they do. They could have been crisp and professional and maybe a little cool. Distant. I might have had different nurses altogether.

There are so many ways it could have been different. So many countless ways it could have been worse.

I stare at Susan's wall and I'm mostly just sad.

None of what I'm going through seems all bad compared to being on the other side of that wall.