Chemoland

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 36^th 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.