Same-same but different

It’s been four days since Tad and I stepped back into a hospital again – this time for Round Two of three month-long chemo sessions.

Many things are familiar: a button to push when you need help, a functional box where no matter what you do the furniture never quite flows, people coming and going all day monitoring what goes in and out of his body, oh so sweet nursing staff and slightly geeky, brilliant medical staff.

But things are also quite different.

Yes we are in a new hospital with new rules (for instance they don’t want me to pee in his toilet for fear the toxins he’s urinating might splash up and get on my skin!). Yes the view is less fabulous (we look out on a massive eucalyptus - covered hill with only the top of Sutro Tower as a visual distraction). Yes the names and faces are all brand new (somehow their oncologists seem a bit more capable of empathy and relatedness).

But what is mostly different is us.

Unlike the first hospitalization which started with Tad quite sick from a sudden bout with pneumonia which luckily clued us in to the fact that his white blood cells were rapidly turning into Borgs, this time around Tad is beaming with health. Two days before being admitted we were working hard in the yard, he was cleaning the garage, schlepping the green trash cans, porting heavy bags of mulch, digging and planting new plants. He was eating well and actively preparing for the one month absence. After a few days of struggling with depression in the beginning he had had the realization that he needed to stay busy and connected during his time home. And it worked like a charm.

It is not til now that I see how much the pain from the pneumonia (and some minor surgery he’d had two days previously) had profoundly affected the way he experienced his first round of chemo. It also deeply impacted me since there seems to be a direct connection between his experiencing pain and my squirming like a school girl, wanting to accost the first medically-inclined person who goes by to make it all go away NOW!

The down side, as he pointed out yesterday, is that he has to go through chemo with his eyes wide open this time, none of that slightly dulling experience of major analgesics to keep a gentle veil between him and reality.

We’re also different in that we know what to expect this time unlike the first round when every cough or spike in fever appeared– in my fearful brain—like the announcement of the last days.

I suppose the most obvious way we are different –and words suddenly fail me -- is that somehow we are perhaps more present to daily life.

The gentle rhythm we had developed during our one-month break seems to have a lasting effect on our life today. We seem closer to our tears and our laughter comes more easily. We are more loving, more tactile, more peaceful. We seem to be grounded in our love in a palpable way.

Our squabbles are brief and almost warm – like when Tad insisted on stopping at Kohl’s to buy new pajama bottoms during our frantic drive from Santa Cruz while I was dead-set on trying to get to the hospital at the agreed-upon time I had painfully extracted from the charge nurse.

(For those who like to know how stories end: We only arrived a half hour late after rushing by my place and miraculously finding parking IN FRONT of the hospital. But by then I was so agitated that I managed to lash out at the young man in Admissions who grunted his greeting at us and then again at the nurse who put us in a room with a loud, angry, middle-aged man who wouldn’t turn down his BLARING gun show on TV and complained loudly because we wanted to turn on the light. Fortunately they kindly moved Tad to his own room.)

If all goes well Tad will be out of the hospital on Bastille Day – all ready for another month of R & R and a visit from my 13 year old godson from Bordeaux.

In the meantime please call Tad now and then (415-514-5413), skype him (thaddeus67) or send him a card (Tad Crandall, Rm 1404, UCSF, 505 Parnassus Box 0290, SF, CA, 94143-0290).

Despite Luke Wilson's promises and the extra thirty bucks a month we both pay for the super fast 3G network, we can’t receive a single call on our cellphones in the hospital.