by Rob Rufus
“Sorry about the mess,” he said. “They’re doin’ lots of renovation up here. But hey, hopefully you won’t be around to see it finished.”
He pressed a button and waited to be let into the ward.
“I mean, you know—like, you ‘won’t be around’ ’cause you’re cured. I didn’t mean that you’d be dead, or nothing, you know?”
The doors opened onto a pure white hallway. Mom was already there, introducing herself at the nurses’ station.
“We’re in room seven,” she said.
He wheeled me down the hall and she followed behind us. Every door we passed was closed.
Room seven was twice as big as the spaceship room. There was a window where I could see traffic lights and rooftops. There was a bed, a chair, a TV, and a bathroom.
A nurse got my IV situated. She and my mom helped me into the bed. Then she left the two of us alone.
The room was a soft teal color, with bright yellow fish painted on one wall.
“This room looks like a fucking day care,” I said.
Mom laughed. She came over to the bed and removed my glasses for me.
“Honey, it’s a children’s hospital—what do you expect?”
I rolled my eyes.
Mom dimmed the lights and stretched out in the chair.
“I’m gonna pass out soon, Mom. You can go ahead back to the hotel y’all are staying at.”
“I’m not going to leave you here by yourself—this chair is comfortable. I’m fine right here.”
I didn’t say anything back. I just lay there, in the stiff bed of my cold hospital room, trying to relax. It was easier with her beside me. Some people need guardian angels. I had my mom.
5
When I woke up, Mom was gone.
The sun was shining outside; the light slashed bright stripes across my blanket through the blinds. For the first time since my arrival, I felt like I was awake.
In the corner, a janitor was holding the unused wastebasket over a trash bag. He peered inside of it—paused—and then dumped it over the bag anyway.
I propped myself up on my elbows and cleared my throat. He sat the trash can down loudly.
“Look who’s up,” he said. “Welcome, Youngblood.”
“Hey.”
He moved around the edges of the room, searching for things to pick up.
“If you’re looking for your mamma, she’s down at the bathroom by the end of the hall.”
“Oh, thanks.”
I lay back down and closed my eyes. The janitor ran his hands through the plastic cushions of the chair, still speaking.
“The nurses got a kick out of her, boy. Did you know one of the late-shift girls told your mamma that visiting hours were over, and she had to leave?”
“No.”
“You know what she told that nurse?”
“What?”
“She told her to get bent!” he said, bursting into laughter.
“Sounds about right.”
He walked into the hallway and came back with a mop.
“The other nurses can’t quit laughing about it,” he said. “But it worked—didn’t it? So more power to her.”
“Guess so.”
“They were talkin’ about you too. You’re some rock star, huh?”
“Not exactly.”
“Sheeeiiit, I heard our new boy was the real deal—heard him and his brother had some traveling rock ’n’ roll group. I must have the wrong room.”
“It’s punk,” I said, coughing. “It isn’t a rock ’n’ roll band, it’s punk rock.”
The janitor laughed again.
“I’ve known some sorry-ass punks in my day, but I got a feeling you ain’t one of them.”
I looked at the tube running into my arm.
“Guess we’ll see,” I mumbled.
He mopped the bathroom and walked back into the hall. He posted on the open door, nodding toward me.
“You ain’t no punk, kid. I know you’re probably scared as hell. But that will pass. You just gotta hang tough.”
“Thanks. I’m trying.”
“Trust me, Youngblood—if you’re anything like your mamma, you gonna be all right.”
* * *
A few minutes later, a nurse took a blood sample. She couldn’t take it from the same arm that the IV was in, so a new needle got stuck in my opposite arm—test tube after test tube filled thick with dark red—it was a hell of a way to wake up.
“Time for your medicine,” she said.
One by one, she dropped pills out of a Dixie cup and into my hand. I counted seven total; different sizes and shapes, all equally unfamiliar to me—I swallowed them all without question.
When Mom came back she wore the same clothes but had applied a fresh coat of makeup. An orderly came in with breakfast, while we watched some dumb story about Tom Cruise on the Today show.
I couldn’t remember the last time I ate. But when Mom removed the lid—scrambled eggs—the way the grease mixed with the bleach smell of the hospital made me grimace.
“I can’t eat this crap,” I said. “I don’t wanna puke.”
* * *
I hadn’t talked to Ali since I was admitted. Nat had been giving her updates, so at least she knew I’d been too sick to talk. Mom mentioned that Nat was thinking about bringing her up to visit me over the weekend—if I was up to it.
I groaned in reply, dreading the thought of anyone seeing me this way.
A few hours later, the door opened again. A woman walked in. She was young, maybe in her twenties, and the tallest chick I’d ever seen. Her legs stretched up and up and up, up under her white lab coat, up all the way to her golden-blond hair.
She greeted me excitedly, explaining that we’d met when I was too drugged up to remember. She reintroduced herself—Stacey Whiteside, Dr. Ranalli’s nurse practitioner.
“You can’t be a nurse,” I said. “You aren’t wearing one of those ugly purple getups.”
Stacey laughed. “A nurse practitioner is kind of a half nurse, half doctor—and the biggest perk is that I can skip the purple.”
“Right on,” I said. I tried to smile.
Stacey had come by to tell us that it was time for me to start chemotherapy. She went over the drugs that would be administered—cisplatin, bleomycin, and something called VP16.
Things were getting way too real. I was nervous.
Is my hair gonna fall out?—“Most patients do temporarily lose it. But not all.”
How long does it take?—“Each dose takes five to eight hours to complete.”
Am I going to puke?—“Definitely.”
Stacey also said the chemo could make me feel very weak. “Because of your age,” she added, “we want to make sure we’re giving you the right dosage. Different ratios are used for children and adults—and you fall right in between. Teenagers always make life so much more complicated. . . .”
* * *
When it was time for my chemotherapy to actually begin, they let me sit in the chair instead of the bed. Two nurses came in. One connected three new, full bags of chemicals to the top of my IV. The other took the trash can from the corner and sat it beside my chair.
“Are you ready?” the nurse said.
“I guess.”
She pressed the keypad on the IV. I watched a little bubble make its way from one of the chemo bags slowly, through the IV, into the needle, and then inside of me. I was determined not to puke.
I’d made up my mind. No matter how nauseous I felt, there was no fucking way I was going to puke (if I can stop myself from puking, maybe I can stop my hair from falling out). The drugs affected everyone differently—Stacey said so herself. For once in my life, I was determined to land on the winning end of a spectrum.
Five minutes—nothing.
Seven minutes—I felt odd.
This wasn’t nausea. I didn’t know what the hell this was.
Sixteen minutes—I was struggling.
A weird, uncomfortable warmth ran through my entire body, all pinpointed at my stomach and throat. I tensed all my neck muscles, trying to shut off my gag reflex.
Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t.
Sixteen and a half minutes—I puked my fucking guts out.
* * *
Nausea and vomiting take on different meanings for chemo patients. You can’t think of these words in a normal context. Even food poisoning doesn’t come close to the sickness that chemotherapy drugs bring on—for that, you have to be poisoned by something much more dangerous than gas station sushi. Something powerful, something radioactive. Maybe even something fatal.
Because that’s what I was doing—poisoning myself.
It’s some kind of Twilight Zone episode, where you have to kill yourself to save your own life. The cells you destroy are your cells. So when they pump those drugs into your system, your system knows they shouldn’t be there and it freaks the fuck out.
Unlike normal vomiting, puking during chemo offers no relief. You can’t purge yourself of the horrible things inside you.
All you can do is try to get through it.
* * *
I puked for hours.
The stuff that came out of my body had the colors and smell of a chemical disaster. It wasn’t human.
If I tried to speak, I puked. If I smelled the puke, I puked. If I puked on myself, I puked at the sight. The more I puked, the more I puked. I puked when there was nothing to puke, dry-heaving spit and pinkish chemical bile.
The IV bags were empty, but I kept puking. It wouldn’t let up.
I sat in my chair and kept my head down. A nurse asked if I needed to go to the bathroom. I stood up but was too weak to walk. Mom and the nurse helped me back into bed. The nurse went into the hall to find another plastic piss bottle.
* * *
Soon after, an orderly brought in a tray—dinner. I puked before he had a chance to open the lid.
* * *
I lay on the bed, lifeless. A different nurse came with pills and water.
She sat them on the side table. I grunted at her. She said to be careful not to throw up the pills.
Why can’t you just inject me with pills? You inject me with everything else under the motherfucking sun.
One at a time, Mom held the pills up to my lips—until I had no choice but to swallow. By the time the nurse came back, the pills were gone. She took my blood again, and then injected my IV with something to help me sleep.
She came back one last time—with a pillow and extra blankets for Mom.
Mom thanked her and flipped off the light. The room was cast in fluorescent afterglow. Then it grew dark, the machines beeping low like a pulse.
My first day of treatment was done.
6
Nat sat with me the next day, while Mom showered at their hotel. He brought me some clothes, but they wouldn’t let me change out of my gown. It was total bullshit.
A nurse came to the door with a wheelchair. She said our parents were down in the cafeteria, with a pizza.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, frustrated. “She knows I can’t eat that stuff.”
“It’s cool,” Nat told the nurse. “I’ll wheel him. I know the way.”
* * *
Nat wheeled me down the hall of the ward, past the other hospital rooms. Again, all of the doors were shut. We took the elevator to the lobby that led to the cafeteria. The nurse made me wear a protective face mask.
It was the first time I’d seen the front lobby of the hospital. The walls were bright colors; the carpet was (you guessed it) purple. The whole place seemed cluttered, like a child’s playroom—which it kind of was.
Rolling through the lobby and seeing all those kids just felt weird—some of them were obviously serious cases. Some of them were crippled. But they all seemed oblivious to it. They were running around, playing, climbing, crying—all the stuff that normal little kids do. Their parents sat far away from each other, watching the children with heartbroken eyes.
I related more to the parents than to the kids.
I didn’t feel oblivious. I understood the gravity of my situation. I mean, think about it—I was almost eighteen. I had driven a car, I had seen a girl naked (in person), I knew shitloads of cusswords—but here I was, stuck at the stupid kids’ table.
“I gotta ask, bro,” Nat said. “What the fuck is up with all the purple?”
I just sighed.
“I know Mom can be annoying, but you’ve got to eat, dude—you know you do.”
“Fuck that.”
“Whatever. You know that you haven’t eaten in four days, right? Actually, fuck it—don’t eat. At least you’re finally getting skinny.”
“It’s the chemo,” I said. “I can’t even talk about food without feeling sick.”
“So eat! What’s the big deal? You’re gonna puke it up, anyway.”
“Good point, I guess.”
He kept making small talk, but I zoned out. I wanted to talk to him—about the band, about Ali, about us—but I just couldn’t do it. I had to put the little energy I had toward not throwing up inside of my face mask.
The air in the lobby was stifling. It was deodorized with bleach and chemicals and who knows what—just like the rest of the waiting rooms. They always wanted to hide the smell of sick, keep it locked up on the top floors so visitors didn’t have to think about it. But I could smell it now.
I just didn’t realize the smell was coming from me.
7
“I heard you got some friends coming today,” the janitor said. He had his work cut out for him now—with the puke and shit and the smell of drug-sweat.
“Yep,” I said. “My girlfriend too.”
“There ya go, I know how you rock stars do,” he said, and winked.
I laughed a lot when he was around, no matter how bad I felt. The janitor never asked my name, and I never asked his. But it was amazing how good it felt to get treated like a normal dude, if only for a few minutes.
* * *
When the morning shift nurse drew my blood, she told me that I was allowed to take a bath. Not a sponge bath—a real bath, my first since I’d arrived.
She ran the bathwater for me. When it was ready, she helped me into my bathroom. The bathtub had two support rails around it, and a call switch on the wall. She wrapped my IV port in sandwich wrap so it wouldn’t get wet. I told her that I could take my own gown off. Tentatively, the nurse left me alone in the bathroom. I eased into the water, trying not to slip. It felt amazing. I felt almost human again.
Damn, I really am getting skinny.
For the first time in my life, my stomach looked flat. Not in a good way, exactly, but screw it. I couldn’t believe I’d puked that much.
I used the crappy soap bar, and I had a plastic cup to rinse with. As I washed my chest, I saw the soap get covered in hair. I looked at my washcloth—it was full of little dark hairs too. I scanned my body, but saw no big clumps missing. I looked at the washcloth again.
I ran my hand onto my chest and pulled at a hair. Then I pulled some more. Then I did the same thing to my head . . . Fuckfuckfuck. They came out easily, with no sensation at all. I was pulling dead leaves from a tree.
There was a knock at the door—it was the nurse.
“I have a new gown for you. Cover your privates with the washcloth and I will come help you out.”
I did as I was told, wondering how much pride I had left to lose.
* * *
Nat walked my frie
nds up to the ward.
When he knocked, I was positioned in my chair (the bed would have been way too dramatic). I psyched myself up to act as normal as possible, even though all I really felt like doing was sleeping.
But I have to say, as soon as my friends walked in I felt a hundred times better. Nat came in first—Paul, Ashley, and Brody followed. They moved around the room carefully, like they were trying to avoid some trapdoor that we’d all already fallen through.
Then Ali walked in.
She looked like a daydream. She wore more makeup than usual—her eyes were outlined in thick mascara that seemed way too sexy for a hospital visit. If the sight of me troubled her, she didn’t let it show.
She had her arms around me before I could even stand up.
* * *
We didn’t talk about my condition, or any of that depressing shit. We talked about the same stuff we would talk about anywhere, the bullshit teen crap that kids talk about in school hallways, or on the phone late at night. Goddamn, I’d missed it.
Paul had a camera with him and kept taking snapshots of us all. Ashley and Nat sat on the corner of the bed, and Ali sat on the floor by my side. Brody had a backpack full of stuff that they’d brought me.
He handed me a shoe box full of handmade GET WELL cards. I began sorting through them. I was touched that so many people had gone to the trouble, but I saw that only a few cards were from my friends—most of the names I didn’t even recognize.
Slowly, I realized that they were all from kids in my fifth-period Spanish class. It was for school credit? Jesus.
I put the box away.
Next, Brody pulled out a stack of porno. It musta been a foot high. On top of the smut pile was a Penthouse with Briana Banks on the cover. She looked like she could eat me alive.
“Ha-ha! Thanks, man. But you know I like chicks with dark hair,” I said, and squeezed Ali’s hand.
I put the magazines away for later inspection.
Ali brought me a small cross, and a prayer card with the Archangel on it. I wasn’t religious—but when you date a Catholic you can’t help getting a little on you. The cross was small and silver. Not a fancy thing, squared off on the ends. Engraved on it was:
J
E
L O V E S Y O U