Time slows when you’re waiting for gravity to empty the post-chemo saline bag into the belly of your old friend. She sleeps. I read. And when we talk it’s about the deep and shallow, the new and old.
In the last month, cancer has forced my chum to do lots of things against her will, including getting a cell phone. We’re a “gotta reach you now” society in 2016, and even the most passionate resister will give in to the intrusion of technology when the caller is ovarian cancer.
It’s my buddy’s third chemo, the first I’ve taken her to. I am still learning the ropes. Technology helped: the night before I’d used Google Earth to “drive” the route to the treatment center on the huge University of Minnesota campus.
Her cell phone. My Google pre-drive. All the technology made me remember how the world worked in the slow days of my childhood. Up from the past swims an image of a small wood box, fastened to the clapboards beside my grandparents back door, the one their friends used. The box was built to mimic a door—a frame made up of a threshold, two jambs and a lintel; then the little hinged door with its tiny knob. And when you opened it, inside was a pad of paper and a small pencil. The contraption’s use is enlightened by the ditty printed on the door: “If at home you do not find us, leave a note that will remind us.”
(Technology to the rescue again. The word jamb didn’t come to me right away, so I Googled “parts of a door frame,” then “define lintel” to make sure it could be made of wood. A old-fashioned dictionary would manage the latter but not the former.)
Back in the chemo suite, the outside world is moving at lightning speed. And I’m supposed to be riding that bolt. But really, right now, all I want to do is hold my friend’s hand while in my mind I open the miniscule door and with the little pencil leave a note that will remind us. Of what? Surely not this—anti-naseua meds and beeping flow meters. No, I’ll write of everything that came before. I’ll remind us of all we’ve done that’s not this. Of life, not survival.
