Phinishing Chemo Pt. 1: Repetitions, Variations, Symmetries

Phin and Molly point to a sign on 

his door announcing his final chemo

admission.

Dustin here. I'm writing this on the morning of Phin's penultimate day of chemotherapy. 

He'll still be in the hospital for another twenty days or so this round, but as far as the chemo goes, this is supposed to be it. He got some chemo yesterday evening. Today, just before dawn, he'll get some more. In the evening, he'll get even more, and then, in the wee hours of tomorrow morning, the nurses will hang his last bag and administer a shot that will make him cry, and then the chemo will end. 

And then we'll wait. 

Like the last time I posted, my thoughts are kind of all over the place. Here are some of them:

• The maxim, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time" keeps coming up, although hopefully not within earshot of Phin because he would hate the idea of an elephant being eaten. It's usually said (sometimes by me) in reference to where we are in his treatment and how we couldn't imagine ever getting this far when all of this started. 
  
  
• I underlined the passage, "Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries," in a Jorge Luis Borges story I was reading the other day. It appeared in a book that arrived just after we moved Phin into the room on this pediatric oncology unit that had until very recently been occupied by one of his fellow leukemia patients, a child beloved by many, who doesn't have to fight anymore, who had completed the final chemotherapy treatments, pounded the disease into remission, and gotten back to being a kid, only to have the cancer surge back again a year and a half later armed with an indignant awareness of the medicines that had been used on it before. 
  
  
• Feeling that occupying this particular room would be emotionally unbearable, Neesha and I initially requested a different one, but no sooner had the move been arranged than Phin refused to go. "You aren't even unpacked yet," we pleaded, "and you can't have gotten attached to this place so quickly." But he was resolute in his intentions to stay, in a way that shocked and disquieted us. He had only ever been in here once before, momentarily, for its previous occupant's birthday party. He had been eager to swap rooms every other time it had been suggested. "No," he told us this time, "I don't want to go anywhere else. It feels good here." 
  
  
• This anguish is not mine to feel. 
  
  
• But I feel it. 
  
  

  

  The chemotherapy drug ARA-C drips

  into Phin's CVC line.

• As more newly diagnosed patients arrive and Phin's time as an in-patient fixture at the Children's Hospital nears its end, I am noticing that the way I conceptualize my life is changing. I used to imagine myself like a little astronaut drifting slowly, silently, far above the planet, doing all sorts of little tasks of maintenance and documentation, exchanging little electronic messages with people far away, all while tethered to an orbital space station shaped like my house. But now, instead of that, it feels like I'm part of some enormous chain. Maybe it isn't a chain. It might be like a giant piece of fabric or something. I don't know. It doesn't feel like drifting through space anymore, though. It feels like my life and my family's lives have become part of this much bigger thing because of this cancer. Like we're connected to the ones who found themselves here before us, and connected to the ones who are here beside us now, and that we will all somehow be connected to the ones who will arrive later.
• Twenty days—the estimated length of Phin’s remaining inpatient visit—is more time than many people will spend in the hospital in their whole life, cumulatively, much less all at once. And it used to seem like a long time for Phin, Neesha, and me, too. But people are saying things to us like, “Wow, you guys are almost out of here!” and we’re like, “Right?! Can’t believe it’s so soon!” and being 100% sincere about it.
  
  
• Some good news is, the coffee machine in the parent kitchen is working again. It's "the People's Coffee Machine," according to my buddy Mike, whose daughter shares the same extremely-rare-in-children type of leukemia with Phin, is close to Phin's age, and is Phin's dear friend. Mike will bolt a full cup of coffee straight from the nozzle without taking a breath, and the machine spits it out at approximately the temperature of molten lava. I told him he was pretty hardcore for that.
  
  
• Mike informing me that he puts ice in the cup first instead of just letting me believe that he chugs boiling hot coffee like it's no big deal was, in a way, also pretty hardcore.