Kate and Elliot at a Mets game, Fall 2006.
Thanks to a last-minute cancellation, we got an 8:30 appointment the next morning at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. We were so anxious to make it that we got up at 5:00 a.m. to catch a train to New York. We arrived more than an hour too early.
“We could have taken a later train, but we weren’t sleeping anyway,” I rationalized.
“But I could lie there with you awake,” Elliot replied. “That’s even better.”
That would have been swell. He always used that word, swell. I liked its old-fashioned Mayberry quality.
We could have used some extra rest. That first visit was a marathon. Sloan-Kettering always meant waiting around for hours and hours. Regulars knew to surrender the entire day. This place would be a wildly inconvenient choice for the long term, but Elliot wanted to be treated at the institution he saw as the gold standard.
When you got out of the elevator to the fourth-floor gastroenterology service, you saw a high desk manned by receptionists in dark blue jackets—most were very pretty girls in their twenties whose parents probably wished they’d go to grad school. After checking in, you walked into the wide waiting room that looked like a hotel lounge, with leathery couches and coffee tables full of magazines and daily flyers of new Sudoku puzzles.
The amenities aimed to keep anxious families from pestering the staff about what the hell was taking so damn long. On one end of the lounge sat two public computers with Internet access. On the other end stood the room where nurses took patients’ blood before they saw the doctors as well as the hallway to the chemo infusion unit. That side had a pantry stocked with free sour balls, graham crackers, slim cans of apple juice (chilled and room temperature because some chemotherapies made patients oversensitive to cold drinks), tea and a coffee machine. The counter had a cheery cardboard sign from the eleventh-floor gift shop announcing the latest addition to their collection of Livestrong bracelets.
“New!” it chirped. “Purple for Pancreatic!”
Most of the lounge’s widest wall was a huge window; you could see the bustle of Third Avenue below, all the cab drivers, pedestrians and scarf sellers on the corner oblivious to the terrified people watching them from above. There were dozens in the waiting room already, but often you couldn’t tell who had cancer and who was family until you checked whose arm had a bandage from a blood draw. A few wore baseball caps or used a cane. One man kept spitting into pail. There was a striking Japanese woman with a chic black suit and a gorgeous head of glossy black hair. To my surprise she was called in for blood work. She didn’t look sick at all. That was encouraging.
Cell phones rang, newspapers rustled, sick people hacked and coughed.
“Elliot Pinsley!” a receptionist shouted out. It was time to get his blood taken. In a move that would become our tender ritual, repeated countless times, Elliot put down his book, stood up, hoisted his drooping pants by the belt, leaned over and gave me a long, hard kiss on the lips before heading off. I was sending my gladiator into battle.
A chatty older woman seemed touched.
“The men usually come here with wives or girlfriends, but lots of women have to come on their own, or with a paid companion,” she said. “If I were rich, I’d make sure every woman here went home with someone.”
Just watch, I grumbled to myself. I’ll take care of Elliot every step of the way, and then when it’s my turn for chemo, I’ll have to go it alone.
Hours passed before we were finally called in to see Dr. David Kelsen, the overtaxed head of the GI department. He was small and wiry, his sharp sparrow features masking deep compassion. He seemed all business in his long white lab coat, except for one lighthearted habit; after he washed his hands, he always wadded up the paper towel and tossed it into the garbage can across the room with a flick of the wrist like a basketball star.
After all that rushing to get to the city on time and hours of nerve-wracking anticipation, the consultation was woefully anti-climactic. Dr. Kelsen concurred with the sax man with the pig cufflinks—inoperable pancreatic cancer. Lucky to have a year or two. Conventional therapies were not very effective.
“It’s a very difficult disease,” he said soberly.
We had already booked a week at the beach with the kids later in August. Could we still take the trip?
“Certainly,” he said. “Have a good time, get some rest and relax.”
That was supposed to be the news we wanted to hear, but it sent another message: chemo wasn’t likely to help that much, so there was no real hurry. We shuffled out feeling frazzled, deflated and weary to the core. But we’d only just begun.
We schlepped home on the train. This was the day we’d promised to take Alex to a Mets game for his tenth birthday. We’d given him the tickets back in June and didn’t want to disappoint him. So after a futile attempt at a nap—we were too upset to sleep—we dragged ourselves into the car and fought rush hour traffic to get to Shea Stadium.
It felt surreal to be on the mezzanine on a beautiful summer night, smelling the hot dogs and popcorn and sweat, jumping up to see the best plays, cheering for the team Elliot had loved since he was about Alex’s age. It turned out to be an exciting game.
Please, just win this for my boys, I begged silently. I felt like the mom in one of those cliché TV movies about a sick child whose dying wish is to see his team win the World Series. But this was real.
It happened to be the first time the Mets’ hugely popular catcher, Mike Piazza, was playing again at Shea after switching to another team. When he sauntered onto the field the crowd erupted in deafening chants of “Mike Piazza! Mike Piazza!” They waved and waved and waved.
It felt like the whole stadium was waving goodbye. Goodbye to the good life that we worked so hard to build.
At least the Mets won that night.