Page 24

Part 12

“Part of Me”

August

“Are you ready to get started, Ms. O’Donnell?” Amy, the oncology nurse, asks as she gets ready to access the chemo port in my chest. I’ve already been given a selection of various pre-meds to keep me from having an allergic reaction and to hopefully help with some of the more annoying side effects, like nausea.

I grab Roddy’s hand and squeeze it tightly. “As I’ll ever be.”

Amy accesses the port—which doesn’t hurt much more than a simple shot thanks to the numbing cream my doctor prescribed—and gets everything all set up for the first of two drugs I’ll be getting for my first four sessions of chemo. This one, Adriamycin, is nicknamed “The Red Devil” because it looks like red Kool-Aid and because of the potential side effects.

“Alright, I’m going to get started, so get your popsicle ready,” Amy says.

The only silver lining with this particular drug is that you have to keep your mouth and throat really cold to prevent mouth sores, so you get to eat popsicles while they infuse it. I unwrap my favorite flavor, cherry, and start eating it. Roddy sits in the chair next to me and holds my other hand. I’m so used to having to carry on conversations with nurses while having blood drawn or other tests done, that it is strange to me to be completely silent while she’s infusing the drug directly into the line, but my only job right now is to keep my mouth cold with the popsicle.

Finally, after about fifteen minutes, the nurse gets me started on the second drug. This one, cyclophosphamide, will take a couple of hours to infuse through the IV connected to my port, so Roddy and I can sit in my little cubicle in the chemo area and read, watch something on my laptop, talk quietly, or nap. My chair is a recliner with massage and heat, and there are tables that lift up on the sides so I can set my eReader, my water bottle and my snacks on them. Roddy’s chair is a fairly standard hospital chair, but he says it’s comfortable.

“You’re all set to go,” Amy says, closing the door to the IV machine. “Would you like some warm blankets?”

“That would be great,” I reply. I’m not normally cold-natured, but it’s pretty chilly in here and after eating three popsicles, I’m freezing.

She grabs two blankets from the warmer by the nurses’ desk, and Roddy helps her cover me up with them. “If you need anything else, I’ll be around. And you can alert any of the nurses in here if you start feeling anything unusual. And sir”—she addresses Roddy—“if you notice any symptoms of an allergic reaction like…”

I tune out the rest as I can’t handle thinking about having an allergic reaction right now. Going through surgery was relatively easy. I was a little scared—as anyone who is going under the knife should be—but mostly I just wanted the blasted cancer out of my body. But chemo is a whole different ball game. I’m not ready to feel bad all the time or to lose my beautiful hair. I’m not ready to think about any of the long-term side effects, like heart damage, that I could have from this. Yet here I am. The cancer didn’t give me a choice.

Thankfully, I have a great support system with my friends and Roddy to help me through everything. I haven’t had to go to a single appointment alone, and I know that’s not simply because I don’t drive.

“You doing okay so far?” Roddy asks after Amy walks away to help another patient. “You look lost in thought.”

I look over to him and put my hand out, which he takes. “I was just thinking about how much I don’t want to be doing this right now.” The corners of his mouth turn down and his eyes soften. I continue, “But also about how glad I am that you’re here.”

“I wish you weren’t doing this either, but I am glad that I can be here for you too,” he says, then he raises my hand to his lips and kisses it.

* * *

The rest of the time at the cancer center passes uneventfully and Roddy drives me home. I’m so drowsy from all the pre-meds that I fall asleep hard as soon as we get back. He stays with me, reading in my mother’s rocking chair, throughout the afternoon. When I wake up, he makes me lunch, just like he did when I had the last biopsy. Thankfully, I haven’t had any nausea yet, so I’m still able to eat.

“If you have students to see or a rehearsal, you can go. I think I’m probably fine,” I say after I finish eating.

“No rehearsal today, and I took the day off from lessons. I told my students last week that they’d have a week off, and they were thrilled,” he replies. “Not sure what that says about my teaching, though.”

I laugh. “I’m sure they love you and your lessons, but kids love a day off now and then.”

“I’m sure you’re right.” He takes the tray of dishes to the kitchen. “Go ahead and pick something to watch, and I’ll be there in a couple minutes.”

We spend the afternoon watching brainless movies and more baking shows. Nate checks in to see how I’m doing via text and tells me he’s working on some proposal for some big Ireland trip that he’ll fill me in on later, and Isaac calls to check in as well. Sophia texts to check on me too and says she’s mailing a care package with some essentials. Abby comes home eventually and joins us until she leaves for a date. Her parents set her up with some lawyer lady named Belinda, and though they didn’t really hit it off on the first date, they both agreed to give it a second shot just to prove to both sets of meddling parents that they’d tried.

“She’s nice enough and at least we have the psycho parents thing in common,” she’d said. “Maybe we’ll discover something else we share this time around, or at the very least, we can have a nice meal together and that will be that.”

Now, as night begins to fall, I feel a thrumming in my head, and I don’t think it’s just from the music in the movie we’re watching. I close my eyes and rub my temples, but this does very little to alleviate the worsening pain.

“Clare, are you alright?” Roddy asks through the pounding in my ears.

“My head hurts.” I can’t think enough to say more than that.

“The nurse said headaches were a potential side effect. Let me go get the binder to see if there’s something you can take for it.” Roddy gives my shoulder a quick squeeze before he runs off to get the binder the cancer center gave me before I started chemo. It has all the emergency numbers, non-emergency numbers, home remedies, medicines you can and can’t take while on chemo, recipes, exercise guidelines, and more. It was a lot to digest when I got it and right now, I can’t remember anything specific.

I feel Roddy sit back on the sofa next to me and hear him leafing through the binder. “It looks like you can only take Tylenol, but I wonder if there’s anything stronger you can take. Do you want me to call the on-call nurse to see?”

“Yes, please, anything,” I say.

All at once, the nausea hits like a wave crashing onto a rocky coastline. I get up quickly—even though that act makes my head pound even worse than before—and rush to the bathroom, sure that I’m going to throw up at any moment. I collapse onto the floor, heedless of my knees on the hard tile, and open the toilet lid. The nausea is still there, but nothing happens. Roddy rushes in the room after me, obviously worried.

“Clare?” he says, panicked.

“Uunnhhh…” or some variation thereof bursts forth from my mouth.

“Clare, just hold on, I’m going to talk to the nurse and get you some help.” Then into the phone, “Yes, yes, hello. My girlfriend had her first chemo treatment today and she’s got a massive headache. …Yes…yes. No, she hasn’t taken anything yet. We wanted to find out what she can do. Tylenol isn’t going to help this…”

This conversation goes on for a while. Meanwhile, I’m still crouched over the toilet because I don’t want to throw up on myself or the floor, and I’m also painfully aware that I might throw up in front of Roddy, but my head feels like it’s going to split in two at any moment so at the same time, I don’t really care. I have never in my life felt pain this bad before. Not after the car accident. Not after my lumpectomy. Never.

“I can’t do this,” I whisper into the toilet bowl, tears streaming down my face. Even through the incessant pounding and the sound of Roddy on the phone, I still hear the plink plunk of my tears hitting the toilet water. Shelley comes and curls up behind my bent legs, purring softly. I half-heartedly pat her head, then return my arm to the rim of the toilet.

Suddenly, I feel Roddy’s hand on my back, and I feel a shiver go up my spine. “Clare? The nurse says you can take Excedrin Migraine. I’ve got some in my bag. She also said you should take your anti-nausea pill to help with that. I’m going to go get those and some water. I’ll be right back, okay?”

I hear myself mutter something incomprehensible in agreement and he runs off to get the drugs. Some amount of time later, he returns with the three pills and a cup of water. It is all I can do to swallow anything because of the overwhelming nausea, but I manage to, one by one. Roddy sits on the floor next to me, looking completely lost.

I hand him back the cup and return to my death grip on the toilet. “I can’t do this,” I repeat, this time loud enough so an actual person can hear me.

“Oh, darling, yes you can. This is just a minor setback,” he says in an attempt to be reassuring.

“Roddy, I feel like my head is going to break apart right now.” I’m crying in earnest, the tears flowing faster. “If I have to go through this every treatment, I don’t want to. It’s not worth it. I can’t.”

“Clare, look at me.”

“I can’t.”

“Look at me.” He doesn’t say this as a command, but as an entreaty. He strokes my hair. “Please, look at me.”

Finally, I turn to look at him. Instead of the pity I thought I’d see in his eyes, I see hope…love even.

“You are so strong. I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but you are more powerful than chemo. You are more powerful than cancer.” He caresses my tear-stained cheek. “And you don’t have to do it alone. I’m here with you. Abby, Nate and Isaac are here with you. We will be with you every step of the way to make sure you kick cancer’s ass and come out even stronger on the other side. Because we believe in you, even if you don’t believe in yourself right now. And, because we love you.”

Through the pain, I feel my heart skip at the sound of those last words. I know he said “we” including my friends, but he still said it. However, I don’t have the bandwidth to process the implications right now. And he doesn’t give me a chance to respond anyway.

“Now, let’s get you to bed to see if that helps any. The nurse said sometimes laying down will help these headaches. Something about blood pressure.”

He puts his hands out and slowly helps me up to my feet. We walk over to the bed and I climb in, settling my aching head onto my pillow. Roddy goes around to the other side, undresses and climbs in behind me. He runs his fingers gently through my hair for a while.

“Feeling any better?” he asks quietly.

As I’m about to answer, I open my eyes and notice an apparition in my bathroom. I squint, but the images don’t get any clearer, but I’d swear it was Abby helping another me to get off the floor. As they come closer to the bed, I notice that Other Me doesn’t have the same port scar on her chest. They disappear quickly, and I turn the little amount of focus I have back to Roddy’s question.

“Yes,” I whisper. “The headache is almost gone.”

“Good.”

“Will you…” I hesitate.

“Stay?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Of course.”

He kisses me tenderly on my shoulder, then rubs my back until I fall asleep.