For me living with cancer means living with chemotherapy. In other words, chemotherapy means
living. People ask me all the time how
much longer I have to take chemo, and the answer is…well, I guess as long as I
want to stick around. So every other
Monday I pack up my chemo bag and my mother and head off to my treatment center
(a place I fondly refer to as Chemoland).
It’s a magical place not unlike the Hotel California; I suppose you can
check out anytime you like, but…well, you know the rest.
My round begins with a five hour stint at Chemoland getting every
anti-nausea drug known to man, a number of rescue drugs to protect any organ
I’d like to keep functioning, and then a push (read: giant syringe full) of my
particular cocktail of chemo, called folfiri. It’s also known around the cancer
campsites as 5FU. (I like that name
better. I suppose it’s because I like to
believe it means 5 “F” yous…right to cancer.)
After my push, I take an infusion of chemo home with me in what looks
like a little box that distributes the drug through a tube connected to a needle
that inserts into a port in my chest. (Yeah, a two-inch needle that sticks into
my chest and is held in place by tape. That’s right, tape.)
By Wednesday afternoon all the FUs are inside me and
hopefully doing their jobs. So I head back to Chemoland to get disconnected and
to get another infusion (which takes about two hours) and a $4,000 shot to keep
my white blood cell count up. And that’s
it! One round complete. Then I wait 12
days, rinse, and repeat. I’ll admit that
before I started my treatment I found the idea of chemotherapy…a little bit
intriguing. I think that’s the way we
feel about anything that we only experience through TV and movies. I wondered what it would feel like, how I
would handle it, I mean…would it be like the movies?
This week I had my 36th round of chemo. I
don’t wonder those things anymore. Chemo
sucks. But, in the words of a greeting
card my sister Laura once sent me, “But if it sucks the cancer right out of
you…then, yeah chemo!” I’m not sure I’ll
ever get there exactly…but chemo, my treatment center, and the people I have
found there have become part of the rhythm of my life now. I guess I wanted to share with you all the
things that go on in a round of chemo because I want to tell you that these
things…these statistic-like things…are the least of the things that go on in a
round of chemo.
When I started going to Chemoland I hated it. I hated walking into a room in which I
immediately brought the median age down by three decades. I hated the lack of privacy, sitting in a
large room with twenty-odd other people.
I hated hearing those people talk about their grandchildren. I hated that I was jealous of them having lived
long enough to have grandchildren. I
hated watching all those people shuffle around with their IV poles dragging
along, as if those poles were the only things anchoring them to life in this
world. I hated that I felt like I was at
a casting call for zombie extras on The
Walking Dead! But most of all I hated
that I was now one of them…because I didn’t want any part of that place. It was too overwhelming.
But at some point, I’m not even sure when, I stopped
eavesdropping on the lives around me and started engaging those who were
fighting to keep them. And eventually I
started to see something else too. I saw
God in this world… the incarnation of Christ in the suffering around me. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote once about this
kind of engagement with the world: “We throw ourselves completely into the arms
of God, taking seriously, not our own suffering, but those of God in the
world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane.”
Watching with Christ…and in that place my understanding shifted. For in that moment, I wasn’t hopeful that God
was present to the suffering in this world; instead, I was present to God’s
suffering in this world…and it was manifested for me in those whom I have been
honored to walk with, even if we do walk around dragging IV poles.
These days at Chemoland I usually hang with my crew,
a group of bikers as a matter of fact.
(We have great intentions of starting our own biker gang: The Chemo
Riders.) And I’m as invested in their
lives and their struggles as I am my own.
But I also find myself hanging with parishioners, previously evaded grandparents, and Chemo Riders alike. I guess I expected to eventually “settle in” at Chemoland. But what I never expected
when I first walked into that treatment center was that I would eventually be ministering from those chairs. I suppose it started as I found
myself receiving treatment next to those very same parishioners I was ministering to outside of Chemoland. And it just kind of grew from there.
I remember reading a book in seminary called The Wounded Healer, but it didn’t
exactly prepare me for anything like this.
It felt natural for me to minister to my own parishioners, but as time went by I found myself ministering to people who have never stepped inside my church.
I suppose in a way cancer has pushed out the walls of my church to
include Chemoland. It’s redefined for me
what it means to walk with those to whom I minister…because ministering from
Chemoland is a whole new ballgame. Because
it’s both a place of vulnerability and authenticity. It’s a place where there’s no time to dance
around the questions that we’re often too embarrassed or uncomfortable to
face. It’s where the matters of life and
death and eternity become, well, the only matters. It’s where I find myself asking the same
questions that I am asked. And,
ultimately, it’s where I do my best to watch with Christ in Gethsemane.
