Another hospital stay—this time, my lungs. I’m not breathing well. Tests, scans, waiting. The doctors suggest a cause they are investigating: the microscopic invasion of the lymphatic ducts in the lungs of millions of unimageable cancer cells. Lymphangitic carcinomatosis. It is not a good development.
“The tumor burden could be quite high,” the pulmonologist says, “making it hard to get the oxygen you need.”
Tumor burden: like a backpack you might put down, like a worry you might unload, a crime you might confess. I’ve been here five days: the river of nurses and techs and transporters; merry-go-rounds of doctors; vitals and alarms. Someone urgently needs to weigh me at 3 a.m. Something is beeping.
Sometimes it feels like the whole world is beeping.
* * *
Outside, a dreary January morning: low clouds draped on the helicopter; uncharacteristically warm and muggy. Around noon, a hospital transporter comes for me and wheels my bed down a long corridor and into the abyss of the hospital for another breathing test, and all during our passage I can see, inside the cell-like rooms we pass, the face of the new president on dozens of TV screens. The world is anxious: The cloud cover has shifted under the tightrope. Everywhere, the tumor burden is high.
“How are you holding up today,” says the breathing tech in the windowless room. “All things considered?”
I’m not sure to which things he is referring exactly. I don’t know if he is sure either.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Considering. How are you?”
He says he is fair to middling.
“Of course, that’s what I always say,” he says. “Because it about always fits.”
When the scan is done, he says, “Bon voyage, madame,” holding open the door as the tech wheels me back into the hallway. “Hasta la vista. Ta-ta for now. Have a blessed day.”
* * *
When I am back in my room there is a covered tray by the bed I forgot I had ordered. There, in the chocolate pudding, I discover a continent of whipped cream that I plan to explore. And also a dish of peaches, which somehow—even in their thick syrup—are plump and firm: a suggestion of rebellion in their freshness—sweet and lovely on the tongue.
John has just returned as well—after spending a few hours at work and at home with the kids—and is now hunched in his impossible recliner by the window where he’s been spending his nights, catching up on email on his laptop.
“Well, that’s a mess,” he is saying, sipping coffee from his thermos.
Behind John, I can see billows of steam rising off the top of the hospital buildings, and the midday light—what there is of it—that filters through the ninth-floor window is silvery and thin.
Everything is strange—so unlike anything we have done before—and everything, too, is exactly as we imagined.