The Plan
Things move quickly in cancer world. Once the invader is identified, it's full steam ahead. There's no time to waste. Every minute without treatment is a minute of cancer's growth in the body, cells multiplying, filling spaces where they don't belong.
The thought of this secret, swelling enemy aligned sickeningly with the hot, stuffy days of summer we were in. It's that stillness in the air right before school starts, the atmosphere heavy with heat and humidity. The minute you step outdoors you feel sticky. Fruits that were at their prime for picking in June and July - strawberries, blueberries, cherries - are now overripe and rotting, lying in sticky piles under their bushes and trees with gnats hovering.
You never know quite what to wear, either, as you move between the moist outdoor air and the shocking slap-in-the-face air conditioning of grocery stores and doctor's offices. The uncomfortable swaps between meltingly hot and shiveringly cold were a sensory mirror of the way my heart felt - like it had whiplash.
The day after diagnosis, I sat in the tall blue children's hospital with my sister and parents, our room with floor to ceiling windows of the hot day outside. As we waited for the doctor, we watched cars crawl by on the steaming black pavement far below, pedestrians shimmering in the strong sunlight.
The doctor's name was Beth, like my mom. Her immediate acknowledgement of our pain and the tears that stood in her eyes made me feel comforted almost at once. As a nursing student, I'd had a taste of the fact that medical professionals can get blasé about delivering the most horrific news, and Beth’s human response made me trust and respect her.
After commiserating that our lives had been flipped upside down and a brief physical exam, she reassured us that as far as cancer went, my sister’s was manageable. She acknowledged it would be a hard road, but told us she fully expected we'd have our girl on the other side of this journey. This was a relief; a small sip of cool water in a blistering desert of pain. She moved on to describe the chemotherapy regimen, my mom and I scribbling notes frantically under the illusion we could find our way out of the relentless panic by drowning it in details. We were looking at around four months of treatment, after which my sister should be in remission and just need close follow-up. Hopefully, our Christmas would not include cancer.
We went home trying to process what the next few months would look like. It was Labor Day weekend, and I had been planning to move back to my college apartment that day myself. But we took those four days as a family, alone at home. We moved somewhat silently around the house, still in shock, walking on eggshells in our own hearts. We went to the beach as a family, something we’ve done my entire life, but we went across the bridge to a beach farther away so we didn’t have to see anyone we knew. We weren’t ready yet.
Our fall was going to look very different than we had planned. We were all blinking fast and hard, trying to visualize this new way of life we had been handed. My parents, about to be empty-nesters, had to move their just-launched college freshman back home where she would require more care than she had in almost a decade. I was embarking on my senior year of nursing school with an eye for oncology; I had been volunteering at the hospital for a year on the very floor where my sister would be treated. I had taken an honors cancer class and applied to be in the cancer clinical rotation. I felt guilty in a nonsensical way, like I had attracted cancer to my family with my interest in it.
Clearly the biggest change was for my sister. She had wrestled through the melancholy, exciting, fraught year of being a senior in high school and was primed for the independence of life at college. But as the summer humidity waned into the crisp coolness of fall, and the leaves began to show off their glorious colors as they shriveled up and broke away from the trees, we too were about to experience a slow but persistent dying of sorts as we marched through the trials of chemotherapy with my sister.
Thank God we didn't know this was only our first foray into the world of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
————————————————————————————————————————
Due to a variety of factors, including my nursing experience, my sister wanted me aware of the details of her treatment plan to help interpret along the way. I can imagine, however, that some siblings wouldn’t necessarily share every plan or schedule. Was this hard, or did it preserve some distance between your heart and the knowledge of what your sibling was enduring each day? Let me know down below in the comments.