The Purple Gingham Shirt

Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.

~Lord Byron

My husband, seated in the hard, plastic chair reserved for the patient’s companion, watched as I paced the small exam room. We waited for the oncologist to enter and tell us what we already knew. It was cancer.

When the doctor came in, I recognized him immediately from a dream a few months before. All my life, I’ve had premonition dreams. I know they’re premonitions when the future part of the dreams doesn’t fit with my current reality.

In the dream, I was in a hospital bed. Chip and I were talking when that doctor walked into the hospital room wearing a purple gingham shirt. The dream stuck out because I thought that the shirt looked odd on him. That was the entire dream.

Chip had been with me long enough to see many of my premonitions come to fruition. He no longer questioned their validity. He tried to reassure me when I told him about that dream, though, telling me not to worry. “For right now, let’s just believe that everything will be okay.”

Now that dream was our reality — leukemia. The doctor said he’d do the bone-marrow biopsy that day in the office. In a few days, he would have the results and see how far the disease had progressed. I would start taking an oral chemotherapy pill daily. I would take the medication for the rest of my life, but my quality of life should remain the same. “It’s not curable, but it is very treatable,” he reassured us.

After he performed the biopsy, Chip cautiously helped my aching body into the car and proceeded to drive home. On the way, he was upbeat and positive, relieved by the doctor’s report. I was sore from the procedure and lay on my side in the reclined front seat. My mind was back on what now seemed to be a troubling dream. I said, a bit irritated, “I know what he said sounded great, but I am not going to be okay.”

I started the chemotherapy pills the next week, and the side effects hit me hard. My body was wasted by exhaustion, bone pain, and raging headaches. I was freezing all the time. It was the end of August in Florida, and I was walking around in jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, and a hoodie but still shivering.

I wondered why the doctor told me that nothing in my life would change. After three weeks of treatment, I developed a fever. I had been warned that if I developed a fever over 100 degrees, I was to call the office. I did and was instructed to go to the emergency room.

When I arrived, I learned that by telling the triage nurse that I had leukemia and a fever, things would become very serious. I was whisked to an enclosed room, and the medical staff took multiple blood samples. My fever was rising, but I was still freezing, and my pulse was extremely low. They ran several tests, but nothing other than the cancer was immediately obvious. After several hours, they took more blood for cultures to try to find out what was going on with me.

Naively, I asked when they would be releasing me. Since they could not find anything obviously wrong with me, I assumed I would be sent home. The nurse looked at me, surprised that I thought I was leaving. She told me that since I still had an uncontrolled fever, a low heart rate, and an unknown infection and cancer, the only place I was going was upstairs to a bed. I asked how long I would have to be in the hospital, and she told me at least three days since the cultures needed seventy-two hours. I accepted my fate and waited for a room to become available.

Later, I was settled in, and my husband went home for the night with a plan to bring me everything I would need for the next few days. Three days turned into five, and doctors and nurses came and went from my room. I was pumped full of IV antibiotics and taken for multiple tests, but still my high fever remained, and no known infections were found.

The sixth day was Saturday, and my husband arrived with a large cup of coffee and a breakfast of non-hospital food. We chatted about my night and were about to set up the Scrabble board to kill some time when my oncologist walked in wearing the purple gingham shirt. Laughing, I said, “See! I told you.” My confused doctor walked over to my bed to shake my hand and asked what was so funny.

My husband chimed in, “Oh, she had a dream about this exact moment months ago.”

“Hmm. That’s odd,” he replied absently as he looked at my chart. He told me that he was releasing me. They still could not find what was causing the fever, but I was not worsening, so I would be able to go home later that day.

When the doctor left, Chip looked at me and said chuckling, “You’re right. That shirt does look weird on him.”

— Amy Michels Cantley —