by Leslie Brody
The nurse came in with a giant pitcher of an awful chalky drink Alex had to swallow before the CT scan.
He could barely sit up to suck a straw. Somehow he sipped the disgusting stuff, tiny bit by bit. I marveled at his persistence. Almost done. And then in one big push he leaned over the side of the bed and threw up.
“Please don’t tell me he has to start over,” I asked the nurse.
“No, he’s still got most of it.”
Finally a doctor gave him a little morphine and he grew still enough for the CT scan. It was his appendix after all. Surgery was scheduled for 5:30 in the morning, just few hours away.
Alex and I were sent upstairs to the pediatric floor. Milo would come back for the operation. Elliot was home with Devon. A pretty nurse brought me a sheet and pillow and helped me unfold the vinyl chair-bed next to Alex’s bed. I lay down to keep vigil yet again next to one of my sweet warriors.
The surgery went well. I could breathe. As soon as Alex woke up, his main concern was keeping the gruesome appendage for show and tell. Not a chance. We settled in to spend another night while he recovered.
“I’m sorry you have to stay with me after all your nights in the hospital with Elliot,” Alex said earnestly. My heart swelled at his compassion. We must be doing something right, I thought.
“Oh Honey, there’s nothing I’d rather do,” I said. “I mean, I’d much rather you weren’t sick, but if you’re here this is exactly where I want to be.”
The routine pediatric ward was nothing like a cancer unit. For patients feeling well enough, there was a mischievous sense of playing hooky, with a vending machine that spat out videos for free. Alex and his sixteen-year-old roommate, Kyle with a broken leg from a daredevil ski accident, spent hours jamming on Guitar Hero. That slow day was a welcome respite.
The most peaceful part of it all was that there was absolutely no question about where I should be. My place was here with my son, fetching him water, helping him out of bed, getting the nurse if he needed painkillers. Ever since Elliot got sick, there was a nagging tension about how to balance my time, how to make sure I was supporting him through the trial of his life while not neglecting my kids, who, after all, would be little for only an instant. On Saturday mornings, when Elliot wanted me to read the paper with him for hours, Alex wanted me to drive him to a friend’s or football. When Elliot was feeling well enough to schlep to a museum but the kids wanted to hang out at home, I’d feel torn.
Now, for the first time in a long while, the family wasn’t revolving around Elliot.
To my delight, Elliot dove into his sudden new role as caregiver with gusto. After Devon got out of school, he brought her to visit. They carried a big duffel bag full clothes, pajamas, toiletries and books. It was a kick to have Elliot pack for me for a change, to have him tend to the needs of the ones stuck in the hospital. He gave Alex ESPN magazines and a baseball glove made out of gold lamé inscribed “You’re a Champ.”
“I miss you,” Elliot whispered when he kissed me goodbye. “I can’t sleep without you.”
That night I smiled to myself as I settled down to sleep next to another man for the first time in a very long while. Alex’s roommate’s father, a National Guardsman on break from Iraq, had decided to stay over as well, and lay down on another fold-out chair squeezed into the room. I couldn’t believe how loudly the guy snored. I don’t know how his wife put up with it.
A LETTER FROM ELLIOT
On the eve of his trip to Italy with Aaron
Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008
Leslie, my beautiful girl…
I’m just about all packed now for Rome, all my meds and maps and insane itineraries, and tucked away in there I have a little piece of you hidden among the T-shirts and sweaters, a photo from Paris, you caught sketching at the Luxembourg Gardens, looking as lovely and fetching as you did that first day you walked into The Record newsroom and I thought to myself, “Boy, some lucky guy is married to her.”
Somehow, I became that guy, and a whole new life opened up for me. The kind of life I dreamed of when I was starting out on my own, when I left New York for Wisconsin filled with a lot of naïve, romantic ideas about finding someone sweet and smart to love and care about, and yes, pretty too, I’m not ashamed to admit it.
I appreciate beauty in art, in music, in nature, why wouldn’t I want beauty in my life every day, someone to love and lust after, to adore and look up to? You’ve given me that, and now that I have you, I can’t imagine a life, my life, without all that.
You should know that I’ve never taken along a photo like the one I just packed. It’s not just that I’ll miss you terribly, which is obvious—your physical presence, the feel of you in bed next to me, honestly, I don’t know how I can eat breakfast without you there—and it worries me because in the past year-and-a-half I’ve felt much closer to you than I ever thought possible—a wonderful thing—and more dependent, a burden which weighs on you terribly, I know.
I wish that part weren’t so.
It’s you that’s kept me alive through all this, all the love and care you’ve given me, the hard work you’ve done and the stress you’ve endured, just to get me and us through my situation, as we’ve come to call it…
From the moment you came into my life—when does it start, where do you count from precisely—your first appearance in the newsroom? DYFS? That goodbye at your car?
It’s all a jumble to me now, I can’t reconcile the chronology. I just know that somewhere over those days and weeks and months, slowly and irrefutably, I started to feel something overwhelming that roused me from an existence without love or desire or purpose other than my kids.
And now I have you, and I don’t know any other way to live. There is so much sweetness and love and caring in my life, that I can’t bear the thought of being without you. Which is why I put up with the biweekly trips into the city, the dreadful drugs, the dark cloud that follows me around.
Because I know that for all that, that every day holds the possibility of something beautiful and loving, whether it’s the corner room at the Old Inn on the Green or Room 310 at the University Club, whether it’s Paris or Montclair.
I have a beautiful life and you to thank for it.
I love you every day…
Elliot
HOW TO SLEEP WITH YOUR HUSBAND IN A HOSPITAL BED
May 2008
Hospitals must rank among the hardest places to sleep.
Besides the fluorescent lighting and 5:00 a.m. blood draws, doctors’ pagers go off. The nurses get alerts from robotic voices crackling from walkie-talkies hung around their necks. Heavy food carts rumble by and the wheels on IV poles squeak as patients push them on laps around the unit. Sometimes you hear the most miserable among them groan, cough or spit. Once a woman who arrived at the threshold of her husband’s room screamed and collapsed sobbing on the linoleum floor. Two orderlies hoisted her onto a plastic chair and dragged it scraping to a conference room so she could recover.
It was May, and Elliot was back in the hospital. After he got back from a fabulous trip to Italy with his son, the cancer had spread to a muscle near his pelvis. Radiation was ordered. He’d never had that before. It was an outpatient procedure, ten doses over two weeks, but in the middle of the series a blood test revealed he had a serious infection. So we were making ourselves at home on Sloan-Kettering’s sixteenth floor. Again.
Gone were my newbie days of pushing together two stiff wooden chairs at night, sitting on one and hooking my feet on the other. I had discovered the joys of the recliners. The trick was grabbing one and keeping it. Competition was stiff. It was heartening to find that in this harsh world, where dysfunctional marriages and domestic violence seemed to get all the press, there were still plenty of husbands and wives who wanted to stay overnight with the spouses they adored. There was a certain bonding among those of us who were healthy. We nodded to each other as we passed in the hallway in the morning on the way to brushing our teeth, like we were all on a str
ange kind of camp out. I was extremely fortunate to know my kids always had a happy place to stay with their dad when I stayed with Elliot in the hospital. Alex always sent his teddy bear to keep Elliot company. It had a Mets logo on one paw and made for a good ice breaker with the nurses.
If I was lucky enough to score one of the precious recliners, I’d wheel it next to Elliot’s bed. I’d wake up from a short nap with my cheek stuck to the vinyl cushion. I was loath to bother the nurses as they rushed around but there were aides who could satisfy my timid requests for sheets, a towel or some soap.
At some point I realized it felt even better to both of us if I just squeezed into bed with him. I didn’t dare do that if he had an IV line in both arms, or if he might have a tender spot from a stent procedure, but otherwise I climbed right in. It was a tight fit so I hitched up the guardrails to keep from falling out. I buried my face in his warm, salty neck and kissed his shoulder where his skin peeked out between the snaps of his hospital gown. Sometimes he couldn’t move much but would turn his head to kiss my hair. There was sheer animal comfort in lying against each other. At least our arms and legs could feel skin on skin.
Staying with him wasn’t about obligation. It was simply where I wanted to be. There is a special tenderness when one of you could choose to go, but you stay where your heart is. We were going through this together, and felt closer than ever.
It was an awfully public setting for such intimacies, but we didn’t really care. We wanted as much of each other as we could get. We couldn’t exactly make love but we could make do. Spooning has its unique rewards, and our hands could travel all kinds of places under the covers. Nurses joked about the newlyweds.
Sometimes only a thin curtain separated us from a roommate. One night the patient on the other side of the drapery was a Jesuit Father. I boasted to friends that I had just slept with a priest.
My nightwear became increasingly brazen. At first I’d wear a sweatshirt and yoga pants. That way I’d be covered up when doctors came in. That outfit got hot, though, so in time I cut down to a tank top and yoga pants. Over time that shifted to just a T-shirt and underwear. I figured doctors had seen it all anyway, and I was too tired to care, and if they got a thrill from seeing a worried wife’s panties, let ’em have it.
Because worry was always simmering under the surface smiles, worry was why I slept with Elliot during almost every one of his dozens of overnight hospital stays, except for a few when I thought I’d fall apart if I didn’t catch up on real rest.
We were both afraid that if I left him to sleep by himself, Elliot might die alone.
Leslie, Alex, Devon, Elliot and Max hiking in the Adirondacks, Summer 2008.
THE PEACH
Summer 2008
Radiation didn’t do much good, and Elliot’s second pair of chemotherapies had stopped working. We talked about an out-of-date drug used by a woman I’d interviewed for the newspaper series who claimed to have accomplished the extraordinary feat of living fourteen years after a diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer.
“It’s like that scene in When Harry Met Sally,” Elliot said. “I’ll have what she’s having.”
He could joke but he was losing his capacity to protect himself through denial. The tumor near his pelvis hurt like a knife slicing down his thigh. He needed increasingly high-powered meds to get comfortable. We spent hours one day in the waiting room of the pain management clinic. I have never seen such a miserable bunch. There was a woman with a chunk missing from her jaw, a man doubled-over in agony in his wheelchair. I thought they should start an anti-smoking version of those “Scared Straight” programs, which used to take juvenile delinquents to prisons to show them how wretched their lives would be if they kept up with their drugs, gangs and crime. Of course I don’t know if smoking had anything to do with these patients’ conditions, but if I ever caught my kids with cigarettes, I’d bring them straight to this clinic for a preview of what might happen. Elliot couldn’t help leaving that place depressed.
He’d seen a Sloan-Kettering psychiatrist a few times since getting sick but didn’t want to go anymore. He didn’t like the way counseling stirred up dark visions about the realities ahead. When he put off making appointments, I was disappointed. It was a daunting responsibility for me to be the only vessel for his deepest anxieties.
Elliot was more open about his despair in his writing than he admitted out loud.
“I’ve lost the ability to believe there’s a good reason to be hopeful,” he emailed me one day in May.
“What makes me so sad,” he wrote in June, “is that there was so much I wanted to do with you, so many places I wanted us to see together. I wanted to see my kids happy with what they were doing in life.”
“I looked in the mirror and now more than ever I look like a guy with cancer,” he wrote another day. It embarrassed him to look that way at the office. “I can’t stand it. And my pants are falling off me. I have to walk around with my hands in my pockets to hold them up. I’m eating everything I can but can’t seem to make a dent.”
On the outside he tried to act like things were going well. He even lobbied for, and got, a plum new assignment at Bloomberg. It was a dream job for him, editing stories about arts and culture. It had a key side benefit—a much slower pace than legal news and an editor who encouraged him to work from home as much as he needed, which was becoming all the time. He polished up colorful stories about theatre directors, art shows, wine auctions and European spas. He even edited a piece declaring that the hot new trend in men’s pants was the “drop-crotch.”
“Who knew,” I teased, “that you would be so fashionable?”
We tried, sometimes, to make light of things but it was difficult for me to look at him naked. His ribs showed like an Auschwitz prisoner’s. His upper arms had lost much of their muscle. They were actually thinner than mine. His thighs were so skinny that his white briefs drooped loosely around them like badly pinned diapers.
“Don’t mourn him now,” I told myself, again and again. “You’ll have plenty of time for that later.”
My pep talks to myself cycled on a relentless loop. Just a hundred years ago a man was lucky to live to be forty-five, so compared to most of human history he’s ahead of the game. At least he’s not a soldier dying on a battlefield without morphine. At least he’s not seven years old. At least we have insurance. At least I have a flexible part-time job so I can take care of him. At least we found each other. So many people go through their lives without a love like this.
I got sick of my own cajoling voice in my head. A therapist once told me I was afraid of anger. I think I was also afraid of grief—that if I gave in to it I would crumble. I would be sucked into a bottomless pit and would never come back out. So I steeled myself with smiles and tried to focus on what we still had. I didn’t want to look back on these days and kick myself for wasting them in sorrow. These were the good days. I had to appreciate them because I knew it would get so much worse.
“Don’t be afraid to get closer,” the social worker had said. “He’s here now.”
Maybe bottling up my distress served a good purpose. I didn’t, after all, fall apart. I kept our house and family running like a finely calibrated machine.
My main goal was to squeeze in as many fun times with our children as possible. We had booked rooms for all seven of us, plus Kate’s boyfriend, at the Hedges in the Adirondacks, a rustic cluster of cabins surrounding Blue Mountain Lake. Getting away always made us feel better. In June we piled into a rented minivan that would fit all of us along with board games, Frisbees, baseball gloves, books and piles of pills. Somehow Elliot managed to hike up two mountains in the drizzling rain, stopping every minute or so to catch his breath. Going so slowly we found pleasures in the path that we might otherwise have missed—tiny red lizards, hummingbirds and mushrooms in wildly phallic shapes. The lake was too cold for swimming, but we kayaked, read in rocking chairs on the porch and had campfires in the dark. There’s a picture of Alex
and Max laughing as they wrestle on a worn plaid couch in our cabin. It was the first time I’d seen them tussle like puppies. Like brothers.
One day Elliot and Alex bought some cheap fishing poles, caught some big ones and threw them back. One time it took so long to pull the hook out of a trout’s mouth that we thought we killed it so we took it to the kitchen to cook for dinner. Soon after the fish hit the ice bucket it started twitching and sprang back to life. Wouldn’t that be nice, I thought. A second chance…
“I wish we were still up in Blue Mountain Lake, just you and me,” Elliot emailed me a few days after we got back. “I’ll bet we could get the Colonel’s room for a few days, say Sunday thru Wednesday. I just want to spend the day in bed. Happy Anniversary.”
It was our eighth. Where had the time gone?
One night back home in July I found Elliot in our room in his underwear, dancing to the thrum of the air conditioner.
“Are you doing that to amuse me or because you’re moved by the music?” I asked.
“Both,” he said with a grin. It was funny but gave me a chill. He was loopy from all the pain medicines, Fentanyl and Lyrica on top of everything else.
He felt isolated working at home so he kept trying to schlep into the office, but commuting was getting harder. “I have to navigate the trains, the streets, on new, more powerful meds,” he wrote. “I feel more than a little disoriented and my reaction time feels slow. Believe me, I’m not challenging cars to cross the street…I’m just woozy, and woozy is not the best armor for surviving in New York.”
He sounded so wistful sometimes. “I’m looking at the picture I took of you in Maine…that summer we rented the house near Popham Beach. You look so fetching. I can’t concentrate on anything else…”