It Takes a Worried Man

by Brendan Halpin

  The lucky thing is that we don’t really have to sit there very long before they call Kirsten to the back. I go with her. The nurse is nice and says I can’t stay, but she allows me to go back to the desk with Kirsten and kiss her goodbye. The nurse asks if I want to be called when the surgery is done, just for my peace of mind. I say yes, and she makes sure she has the correct number. I give Kirsten a hug and a kiss, and the nurse says, “We’ll take good care of her.”

  “You’d better, ” I say. It is still early, so I decide to walk to work. It is only about a twenty minute walk, which makes me rethink my whole trolley-taking path. I feel sad, and not just because I am listening to the Carter Family as I walk. This is just one more thing that makes it all seem real.. Just as I am about to hit work, I come to this song called “I Never Will Marry,” which is a really haunting tune with this chorus:

  I never will marry

  Or be no man’s wife

  I expect to live single

  All the days of my life

  The shells in the ocean

  Shall be my deathbed

  The fish in deep water

  Swim over my head.

  Yes, it is another song about a jilted lover taking her life, and though the whole “all the days of my life,” doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense in the context of someone about to throw themselves in the sea, it nevertheless moves me to tears. I listen to it three times in a row.

  While I am at work, Kirsten is put under conscious sedation (which I had when I had my wisdom teeth out, and which is a really wonderful high, and which I would be administering to myself nightly right about now if I could get my hands on those wonderful wonderful drugs) and this hose is implanted in her chest wall. The hose has this mesh collar that is designed so her tissue will grow into it and really anchor it in there. This becomes important later.

  By now it shouldn’t surprise me, though it kind of does, that the jackasses never call me when the surgery is done. I check my voice mail kind of frantically all day and finally decide that while they don’t give a shit about my peace of mind, they probably would have called if she had died on the table. But why the hell did they say they would call?

  Hosed

  The hose is problematic immediately. First and most important, it is very painful to Kirsten, and it pretty much disables her. She can’t reach over her head, which means she has a very hard time getting dressed, and she’s not allowed to lift anything, which Rowen takes kind of personally, and which, overall puts a lot of limits on what you can do. We can’t, for example, really hug her anymore. We can sort of gingerly place our arms around her while she winces and goes, “watch out for the hose!” but that’s not really the same.

  Also, psychologically it is tough. Up to now, Kirsten, except for having a fatal disease waiting to take over her whole body, has not been sick at all. She is now pretty obviously in pain and unable to do things she used to do, and I get this, “Oh shit, here we go” feeling.

  She is supposed to have these visiting nurses come out to tell her how to flush out the lines and everything, or possibly to do it for her, and there is some kind of colossal mixup on the first day, but the nurse eventually arrives and gives Kirsten a five-minute and terribly confusing tutorial on how to draw some blood out, pump this anti-coagulant in, and keep it all fine and dandy. Kirsten is game, but soon one of the lines is filled with blood, and this isn’t supposed to happen, and this is on a Saturday, so she calls Dr. J., and Dr. J gets another visiting nurse to come out, and this visiting nurse is male, which does sort of disconcert her at first, but he turns out to be much kinder and more helpful than the first nurse. He is patient and professional and explains things clearly and in detail, and he flushes out the hose.

  Kirsten gets her initial doses of chemo through the hose, and then, a few days later, it fills with blood again. She goes back in to the hospital, and they determine that the hose is actually broken, and they apparently root around the back room looking for parts so they can fix it and find that the parts are on order from Korea or the Philippines or wherever they pay some kid twenty cents a day to put this piece of shit together, so they have to remove it. Kirsten is in the hands of the day surgery people, so Dr. J is not actually there, and apparently the doctor, whose name I have but guess I should not write since everybody else in this book gets a pseudonym, is a total asshole. “Well,” he says to Kirsten in this annoyed tone, “I have another scheduled one in a few minutes, so I can do this now, but if you really want to have the drugs, you’re going to have to come back late late this afternoon, and maybe we can try to squeeze you in…” you get the idea. This is one of these “choices” they give you that’s really no choice at all, because you are already there, let’s just get this over with, so they give her a shot of Lidocaine, which is I guess like Novocaine–some kind of local anesthetic, and these are famously ineffective on Kirsten–she usually needs three times what the dentist thinks is a reasonable amount in order to really get numb, but clearly Dr. Mengele here is not really concerned about getting her numb, so he shoots her up and yanks the hose out, and you may recall that the hose is designed so that your tissue grows into it, and so it is incredibly painful, and Dr. Mengele is an asshole about it, and she is in pain and sad.

  I find out all this when I get home that day, and I am ready to go down to the hospital and raise hell about Dr. Mengele, I can’t believe they ripped this thing out of her with a shot of a crappy local anaesthetic (and, later on, other medical professionals will also be incredulous), but Kirsten says there’s really no point, it’s not like he did anything wrong; he was just a dick. I think that is doing something wrong, but it’s not, you know, the kind of thing that you usually get a lot of satisfaction complaining about.

  Except complaining about it right now is pretty satisfying, and if there is any justice in this universe at all, which I have come to doubt pretty severely, this guy will at some point become a torture victim and I’ll do a reverse Amnesty thing and write to his captors telling them to keep up the good work, and mail them car batteries and bamboo shoots and whatever else they need to keep this motherfucker in pain.

  She Doesn’t Want to Canoe

  The last weekend before Kirsten starts her chemo is our anniversary weekend. We do not plan to do anything romantic, mostly because Kirsten has this hose dangling out of her and feels kind of crappy. We decide to head down to her parents’ house. They live a block away from the beach about an hour from here. We spent many weekends down there this summer when we were afraid the Troll was really going to flip his lid and do something scary. We all got very comfortable down there, and it’s a big enough house that we can be down there without everybody feeling like they are on top of each other, which is important.

  So we all head down there and have a very nice, relaxing weekend. Sort of. The thing is, Kirsten’s impending treatment is sort of hanging over the whole weekend. What we want is just to head down there and hang out and forget everything, but Kirsten’s parents seem to want to make this a special weekend for us, and while we appreciate the impulse, it does get kind of strange, and their desire to make it special keeps reminding us that it is special, that after this weekend all the shit starts. They decide at some point that we should take the canoe out and do some canoeing. I am game, but Kirsten seems kind of lukewarm. She says something like, “I don’t know if I really feel like it, ” but apparently this is not sufficiently negative, because the next thing we know, the canoe is strapped to the top of Kirsten’s mom’s car, and her dad keeps saying things like, “hey, you guys ready to take the canoe out?”

  Kirsten eventually has to bite her parents’ heads off to make them understand that she doesn’t want to canoe. I feel bad about this whole thing. We are both kind of depressed–we have just lived through the week with our epic meetings with Maryann and Dr. J, and I can totally see how her parents want to do something that will be special and fun, but they are being so solicitous that it keeps reminding us that this is not just a
normal weekend, which is all we really wanted.

  Still, it’s nice to hang out. We go to playgrounds a lot, I get my skates, which I have used about three times since I bought them, out of the trunk and do some great skating on the traffic-free streets of this sleepy rich sailing town in the off-season. I also start writing this in a notebook that Kirsten’s dad gives her. The sense that the shit is en route to the fan casts a pall over the whole weekend, though.

  One notable thing that happens is that we are at this playground with Rowen, and we are playing this game where she drops me of on one play structure and says, “Okay. You have a good day at school, honey, I have to go to work now,” and then runs over to another play structure for a minute, then comes back and “picks me up”so we can go to our “home,” which is a third play structure. and I see this very attractive woman jog up with her jogging stroller and toddler, and I am kind of admiring the whole look–you know, attractive young mom all sweaty and spandex-clad–and about five minutes later her much older husband comes wheezing up to the playground. He is also decked out in jogging gear, but his wife was pushing a stroller and beat him by a solid five minutes.

  I immediately judge the guy, which I am sure I will pay for eventually, and I am seized by a desire to kick him to death. I mean, when a guy in his fifties shows up with his twenty-years-younger wife and toddler, you just know there’s a fifty-something ex-wife and kids just barely younger than the trophy wife somewhere. Right? I mean, I am sure there are exceptions, but this is the rule.

  And I just get so fucking mad at this guy. Now again, I don’t know his specific situation–maybe his first wife was an abusive drug addict or something, or maybe he’s even widowed, but I can’t help feeling that he has a perfectly good wife somewhere that he threw away because she got old. And all I want is for my wife to get old.

  The Mice

  When we moved in to our new house, it became clear that it was infested with mice. We have baseboard heat, and under all of the radiators were lines of turds. Behind the oven and washing machines was the telltale blue-green of mouse poison and, of course, a ton of turds.

  We occasionally see the mice running through the halls at night, and I always find turds on my stove and countertops in the morning. I love to cook, and I therefore do basically all the cooking. I like it because it is creative–take a bunch of stuff and mix it together to make something wonderful–and it’s finite. You chop some stuff up, you cook it, and you eat it. Done. This is incredibly unlike teaching, where nothing is ever complete. You do get kids coming back years later and saying you changed their lives, which rarely happens after you’ve cooked even a really fantastic meal, but you very very rarely feel at the end of the day or even the end of the year like what you wanted to do is done. There’s always more to do. This is not the case with cooking.

  So cooking is very therapeutic for me, and I take it kind of personally when mice shit in my frying pan. Or on my countertops, or all over my industrial size can of sesame oil that I made a special trip to the Chinese supermarket for. So when we first move in, I buy a bunch of poison and scatter it throughout the house. Of course, it doesn’t work at all. This is probably more a comment on our housekeeping than anything else. I mean, if you are a mouse, are you going to go for poison or for some succulent crumbs of last night’s dinner that are here, there, or everywhere? It’s really no contest.

  I am doubly concerned because we are landlords now and have a legal obligation to keep the building vermin-free, which is easier said than done. So I go for the glue traps. It has been my experience in the past that the flip traps don’t work at all, so I buy the glue traps even though I have a very traumatic memory of catching a mouse in a glue trap when I was about 10 years old and flipping this screaming mouse into a bucket of water. It was horrifying.

  But I’m not ten years old anymore, so I figure I can deal with it. At first it looks like it’s not even going to be an issue because they studiously ignore the glue traps. One mouse even manages to shit in a glue trap without getting stuck. I am convinced this is the mousy way of saying “fuck you.”

  But I stick with it because nothing else is working, and one night I hear a loud squeee squeee squeee, and I see a mouse caught in the trap I have wedged between the garbage and the countertop. I will come to call this “the money spot,” because while the mice will continue to ignore every other trap in all of their favorite locations, I will catch at least six more in traps put in this exact spot.

  When I hear this squee squee squee, I put my plan into action. I go to the rag bag and grab a rag, which I place over the mouse. I then go to the bookshelf and grab the giant hardcover French/English dictionary I have had since high school. I hear the voice of my ninth grade French teacher echoing in my head, going, “people, spend the extra money for the hardcover dictionary! You’ll be glad you did!”

  I drop the dictionary on the mouse, and boom–he’s gone. I pop the rag-covered corpse in the trash, and I’m done. I feel like I should seek out Monsieur Stirling and tell him, but I guess this probably isn’t the use he had in mind.

  At first this is kind of fun. I feel good about giving the mice a more humane death than they get from poison, and I feel good about getting some revenge for that shit in my frying pan. It does not bother me at all.

  And then Kirsten is diagnosed, and the news just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. And suddenly I feel kind of bad for doling out death, especially when we are trying like hell to fight against Kirsten’s. It seems like bad karma. But what the hell am I going to do? They can’t stay here, and while you can ask them to leave, they don’t usually comply. So I have to kill them. But I start to hate it. What makes me incredibly sad is that they stop screaming before I drop the dictionary on them. They stop screaming as soon as they are covered in the rag. Does it comfort them to be covered up? Or do they know that it’s pointless to scream because their situation has just gotten hopeless?

  Chemo Begins

  Kirsten starts her chemo on a Monday. I spend the day on a bus, on some incredibly ill-advised trip with my school to try to climb a mountain in the rain. On the way up, one of the science teachers makes us watch October Sky, about which they say, “it’s great! It’s about science!” I guess this is why only science teachers went to see it, but I watch it because it’s on, and it turns out to be pretty engrossing, except for the fact that Laura Dern, who I have had a crush on since Blue Velvet in 1986, dies of lymphoma in this movie. Great. Perfect fucking thing to watch while your wife is starting chemo for her stage 4 breast cancer. Ugh. I pretend to be interested in the scenery or the bus driver’s ranting about how if he were in the lead bus, he would have taken a different route (the guys who drive charter buses are a weird, weird bunch) so that I don’t start sobbing.

  I have my cell phone with me. (Yes, I did eventually get one because I was freaking out over the idea of Kirsten being in the hospital and me not being able to go to the grocery store, but also because it felt like I was doing something, which of course I wasn’t.) We are out of the service area up here on the mountain, so I have to wait till the bus ride home to call her. She is shockingly upbeat. She says the whole thing took less than half an hour, and she feels fine.

  The chemo was a comparative breeze. And it will be the next two days, too. The famous nausea never makes an appearance, and she still has all her hair.

  After a few days, she gets tired. Really tired. Not exactly can’t-get-off-the-couch kind of tired, but definitely can’t-take-a-fifteen-minute-walk kind of tired. This is kind of a drag, but it is really not that bad–I have seen her this bad before when she’s had the flu or a cold. It is no fun, but it is not “Oh my God she’s so sick the cure is as bad as the disease” kind of thing.

  God Intervenes After All

  As the news of Kirsten’s illness spreads, the cards and letters start pouring in. I get especially large numbers of cards and letters (and even some rather generous checks) from my relatives in Cincinnati, who are a group o
f people I like but have never been especially close to. (This is because my mom was the only one out of seven kids to become anything close to a hippie, and she was not incredibly close to her family while I was growing up. Now she’s back in the fold and I’m eight hundred miles away.) They call and let me know that we are in their prayers.

  My friends are also calling and writing to check in. Basically everyone we know with a child Rowen’s age offers to help out by taking care of her. My friend Karl comes to visit and burns me a couple of CD’s of Johnny Cash songs I don’t already own. Kirsten’s sister Nan comes to visit and does our laundry and cleaning for a week, in addition to providing valuable moral support and babysitting Rowen while Kirsten and I go see Legend of Drunken Master, which is one of only a handful of sequels better than the original. (The others: Evil Dead 2, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Superman 2, Batman Returns.) (I know what you’re thinking about The Godfather, Part II, but I still like the first one better.)