Chemo dreams
You arrive at the Syringe Lounge at eight in the morning. A nurse there in scrubs asks your full name and date of birth. She leads you past the patients, all plugged into their drip stands, tired-eyed, crumpled, hairless, translucent. You glance at them and convince yourself your presence here is a kind of anomaly. They have nothing to do with you—you’re just passing through. But when she brings you to a station and explains to you the process you begin to understand: you are one of them, too. You watch her take the needle and puncture your chest port. Very soon she’ll press a button and fill you with evil juice. You’ll lay back your head and the chemo will start flowing, poisoning your cancer. And poisoning you.
On a cold night in January at a DC-area hospital, I was diagnosed with cancer. Colorectal. Stage three. No warning, no symptoms. Just a burst of rectal bleeding. Then a long weekend in the emergency room wondering how it could be me. In that iodine world of soft foods and sneakered nurses, a doctor with a clipboard told me things as they stood: there’s a carcinoma the size of a child’s finger in your sigmoid colon. It’s pushed a hole through the intestinal wall. Surgery will be required. Chemo’s virtually certain. Radiation is a maybe—just sign this form so we know you’ve understood. Blinking up through a low strobe of hardcore narcotics, I tried to make sense of things, to put the world to words. I was a gym rat, a non-smoker, a kind of paleotarian. There was no reason I should have gotten this. And yet: this tumor. There it was. With a wife and four sons and a daughter due in April, I thought about my options. And I thought I had none. By month’s end they’d cut out a foot of my intestine and two dozen lymph nodes—who knew there was so much of yourself you could lose?
My treatments took place at the Syringe Lounge at Oncology, my nickname for the infusion room on the hospital’s second floor. They’d implanted a little reservoir with a long small-bore catheter to mainline the chemo straight into my aorta. I showed up and sat there while they steeped me with poison, bringing books I’d never open, never picking up my phone. I didn’t do anything. I sat there just dreaming. Looking out as if trapped in a tiny glass prism with the moments of my life being shot out like a rainbow. I dreamed dreams of a future as a kind of returning, getting back to my before-life, before all this ruin. Looking out at the patients with a cold hard detachment, imagining I was apart from them, just visiting. A tourist. Some of them wrapped up with pillows and blankets, as if settled in for a long flight through the antiseptic doom. But I didn’t want to settle in. I dreamt to get away from it. This new lonesome life of dying in slow-motion was a long mortification I was eager to ignore.
The rivers in hell run clear with oxaliplatin. This was the drug they said would save me from myself. Since the carcinoma had managed to infect a couple regional lymph nodes, there was real risk of loose cancer cells having spread to other organs. The idea was to nuke me of any post-surgery neoplasia. These invisible little leeches that may or may not be lurking in my guts. But there was no way to really know whether the chemo would certainly kill them. There was no way to really know whether they were even there at all. Success was defined then more or less by just not dying. Either from the cancer or the chemo meant to cure it. But the drug itself wreaks such a brutal mortal havoc that the race you’re running against the microbial death squads is really just a race that you’re running against yourself. You’re left, then, with the uneasy understanding that you’re taking part in your own slow killing. They’re using a poison to kill your advanced cancer and the poison itself could be what kills you before it’s through. You find you’re one side of a life you’re no longer living. You’re part of a world now divided by illness, of sickies and normies. And your side has been chosen.
What shook me from the dream life were the side-effects of the chemo. The bodily humiliations were relentless and fluid. There were nose bleeds and rashes, a sensitivity to coldness, a pain sparkle down my esophagus just to drink a glass of water. Aches and pains flaring deep in my body, a shear like shattered glass in my bones after each of the infusions. My fingerprints burnt off, I was becoming neurotoxic, a day-and-night alternation between constipation and diarrhea. I ebbed in and out of a black suck of exhaustion. Like a dark tide flushing me out of my very own soul. The only course of action, I’d decided, was to look past this. To dream through the treatment, to hurry it up. To endure.
There’s a temptation to admire this in yourself as some kind of resilience. Our culture of self-therapy encourages this delusion. Tension, trauma, adversity, looming tragedy. These parts of the human experience are to be managed or avoided. We’re told that our strength is a matter of our own self-creation. That you can peer into the eyes of death’s handsome angel and not blink, not even make a move. But if there’s one thing I learned it’s how that angel seeks to blind you. Holding up a mirror to your own dark self-regard. You can stay in this place forever. You can die there if you choose to. Or you can allow for your suffering to be a mercy. To make you someone new.
Flannery O’Connor said that sickness is a place where no one can follow you. There’s never any company there. You go to it alone. Dying over twelve years from lupus, like her father, O’Connor knew a loneliness through her illness and its intended cures. She was never able to marry. She was cared for by her mother. Two grown women moving around this apportioned misery with the younger watching the older watching the younger decompose. All the while writing, adhering to her vocation, crawling out of bed and sitting at her typewriter to give us her stories, her letters, another novel. How long would it take me understand why He’d taken her, tasking her with such suffering when she still had so much to give to us. “At the height of her powers”, as it reads in the short bio on the back cover of her novels. At the age of thirty-nine—the same age that I was at the time of my diagnosis.
I was reading O’Connor when I was admitted to the hospital. I’d made a kind project of reading everything she’d ever written. Months later, through the pain haze, the chemo and its ruination, I finished all her letters and opened up her Prayer Journal. In this small Sterling Notebook we have Flannery in her most intimate meditations. Twenty-one years old and a graduate student at Iowa, begging God to make her worthy of what it is that she wants from Him. “I must write down that I am to be an artist,” she declares on the 14th of April, […] “It will be a life struggle with no consummation.” […] “…Only when the struggle is cherished and directed to a final consummation outside of this life is it of any value.” In entry after entry she works herself toward a fuller understanding, that in asking to be made a writer she is more truly asking to be given a kind of suffering. We read this most clearly later in September when she writes that what she wants even more than to be an artist was simply to want God—even if it meant a life of suffering. “Dear Lord please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss.” […] “It would kill me like cancer and that would be the Fulfillment.” The suffering she feels called to is a channel to receive God’s graces. That she asked for this calling and the grace with which to bear it is one reason her writing remains among the truest of the last century. This handwritten passage by a girl in her dorm room had reached across decades to a reader in his sick bed and in his misguided seeking of a mere consolation she had showed him that what he sought was that same grace to suffer for his own salvation. She’d never lost sight of her life as one integral journey. That the illness was a gift to her. It made her who she was. That reader would later give the only name there was to give to his only daughter: Mary Flannery.
O’Connor sought grace and was given it through her suffering. She had her lupus. I had (or have) my cancer. She showed me how to ask for a most final grace and the grace to bear the suffering that grace may cost me. Augustine said that life’s simplest pleasures are mingled with bitter suffering. God causes or allows this to save us from ourselves. For if we didn’t have them, the evil and the setbacks, we’d fail to long for heaven. The life that He intended when He placed us in the garden. I learned from O’Connor there’s a gift that comes through suffering, that my cancer and its treatments were the instruments of His grace. I learned to rejoice in our sufferings, as says The Apostle, knowing they produce endurance and that endurance produces character and character produces hope and that hope will not disgrace. That though you are suffering and your outcome may be uncertain, there are mercies so severe we don’t see them when they’re offered. I believe in God and I believe He gave me cancer. He either caused it or allowed it because there was a lesson that He had for me that only could be learned through it. I want to learn that lesson now, to see it and hear it. Even poison can be sacramental if you believe in it. Your suffering may just be the very thing that saves you.
