Cancer Patience

“Cancer is happening to you for a reason,” the taxi driver specializing in patient transport utters with the cringe worthy confidence of a mediocre actor playing a caricature of a wise man in a 1983 sitcom’s tone deaf very special episode about the gravity of cancer. “I am annoyed by your sanctimonious declaration for a reason,” I reply as the live television studio audience in my imagination bursts into rapturous applause in support of my witty retort.

I head downtown for a blood draw to witness the latest numbers impacted by chemotherapy. Having intimate experience as a diabetic with an established history of daily numbers games, I tend to play this lab work with the orthodox religious fervor of a scratch off lottery ticket devotee, looking for renewed hope in whatever rewards I can get to simply keep playing.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital often feels more like a crowded airport than a house of healing with its array of fast casual and upscale restaurants, Chicago souvenir T-shirt filled Walgreens, expensive impulse purchase gift store, abridged selection bookseller and countless people walking around with the weight of their ailments as a mirror image of the defeated travel daze always found on the throngs of passengers choosing to remain stationary on the seemingly endless moving walkway of the United terminal at O’hare.

I head for the nearest sanitation station before heading up to the oncology floor. Do I put on the complimentary face mask for greater protection in an immunocompromised state and run the risk of appearing like I’m a Michael Jackson superfan cosplaying one of his memorable tabloid looks?

I choose to go maskless this one time to appease the memory of a cognitive behavioral therapist I saw in my twenties, who convinced me to eat crumbled up cookies from a New York City sidewalk as a fleeting attempt at exposure therapy to conquer a previous germ fear, which in epiphanous hindsight may have ultimately played a significant role in my lymphoma, and certainly my diabetes, making me now believe that OCD is a real superpower that must be allowed to flourish for safety’s sake.

Of course I have to ride an elevator for 21 long floors with what appears to be an impromptu meetup of bronchitis enthusiasts, none of whom opted for face masks or from what I could tell, while trying to stifle a panic attack, the use of their hands or elbows to stop their collective array of virally driven mucosa vapor from profoundly dampening the mood and air of our shared cage.

The waiting area of the oncology center is quite comfortable, resembling a suburban furniture showroom, specializing in the very best of clinical chic and practical design, an aesthetic that feels directly inspired by the whimsy at the heart of the 1993 Microsoft “Office Waiting Room” clipart collection.

A panel of framed windows showcases the breathtaking scene of the Streeterville neighborhood architectural icons, illuminated by the sparkling turquoise of Lake Michigan in the background, but this is all shamefully hidden behind a row of clunky reception desk cubicles far from the windowless patient seating area.

Such a vista could be better served as a pleasant distraction for patients, who really have nowhere else to gaze but at each other as that beats having to leaf through a vast array of complementary LIVING with Cancer! style magazines piled high on every side table.

Most of these publications are the literary equivalent of an antidepressant television commercial in what are essentially 60 page pharmaceutically funded advertorials, bounding with stock photo middle aged models, radiating surprisingly good health, maniacally smiling under bright blue skies, while on bicycles, all most likely on their way to the housewares aisle of TJ Maxx to buy more Live Laugh Love emblazoned tchotchkes to continue their fevered curation of happy lives, inexplicably detached from the unsightly and sobering magnitude of daily symptom management.

Cancer patient gawking as a cancer patient, while waiting for an appointment to discuss cancer, is certainly not worthy of a bucket list entry, but surprisingly it sure beat my Olympic hold time wait of forty-seven minutes earlier in the day with the cable company to sort out their billing error, while being bombarded with an endless supply of disingenuous “your call is important to us” propaganda over a royalty free muzakial tribute to adult contemporary master electronic keyboard artist John Tesh.

At best, visiting an oncology department as a cancer patient makes you feel the support of an emotionally open community that actually understand the weight of this epic health battle, and, at worst, turns into a presumptous suffering contest, where the first prize, while rife with bragging rights that should qualify for a wide assortment of Make-A-Wish adult version dream fulfillment, is actually the last place that one must really try to avoid.

“Patient Brandstein,” the phlebotomist announces to the waiting room as all eyes instinctually land on me as I stand up to heed the call. I feel a burst of fear that perhaps I’ve drawn the dangerous attention from someone unhinged among the crowd that now has a key component of my identity that was just so carelessly semi-publicly revealed.

I stare at the face of my phlebotomist, a kind woman about to dig into one of my veins. I study her behavior for any signs that match what I’ve been reading about for years in my beloved earmarked copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders before examining her equipment with all the efficient hyper-vigilant scanning I can muster to detect any forms of tampering before momentarily and ashamedly contemplating the undeniable benefit of a high seven figure settlement payment to afford luxury housing much closer to this state of the art hospital for my added convenience in battling whatever the result of their imagined malpractice.

As I see the vials filled with precious samples of my actual life force after the bandage has been applied to hide the evidence of this sanctioned robbery, I offer a small gambler’s prayer outside of the traditional Jewish canon that they provide winning numbers in exchange for a few personalized mitzvahs.

At the top of the list, not providing so much resistance whenever my beloved Yiddishe Mama, an inspiring and recent cancer survivor in her own right, asks me do you need anything with the incessant quality to match the mastery of my OCD skills that I just may have inherited from her gene pool, where the filtration wasn’t strong enough to reduce the impact of our ancestral mutation of a specific love gene that has been impenetrably fused with a more demanding paranoia gene.

On the down elevator towards meeting my scheduled taxi to return home, I’m forced to make an emergency pit stop on the fifteenth floor to avoid the germs of an elderly oncology patient’s wheezing caretaker. This poor woman, draped in an ill fitting over-sized smock that reveals food stained scrubs and a coin shaped blood stain looks like she needs to be in the wheelchair she is pushing far more urgently than her client.

I illuminate the down button at the center of the elevator bank’s call panel with a finger that I mustn’t forget to Purell, not having been off the previous down elevator for less than three seconds.

A large man who appears to have miraculously survived a head transplant looks at me with the intense suspicion commensurate for an escaped refugee from the psychiatric ward clumsily holding a fistful of dirty syringes.

A down elevator arrives. As he enters, I jog away towards a bathroom, knowing I wouldn’t have the emotional fortitude to share an intimate space with a man I think of as Frankenstein’s monster, guiltily remembering all too well from my hackneyed tenth grade report on the Mary Shelley classic or rather the more easily plagiarize-able student classic Cliff’s Notes presents an Expert Commentary on Frankenstein, the dangers of flippantly assigning oneself to a mob mentality to avoid examining the externalized scars of our own worn psyches.

In the taxi on the ride home, I’m faced with an exhaustion so profound I allow myself the pleasure of staring into shut eyelids at the magical realm of Sleepyland, where for the duration of ten miles in unexpected late midday Lake Shore Drive traffic, I am cast in a lucid dream of relative, in the familial sense, normalcy and have the pleasure to escape OCD driven cancer fueled perpetually diabetic threatening life compromising game over fear.

I’m adrift upon an island in time, a physical manifestation of Shabbos, surrounded by loved ones, those still here and even those from the beyond, without any of the forced pressure of holiday joy, gathered around the warm glow emitted by the Zenith television set of my childhood, my Rosebud, a simpler device projecting a simpler age, not too long before the smaller screens would ultimately conquer and divide us.

We indulge in the evaporated pastime of watching a subpar prime time television show because there seemed to be nothing else more urgent or worthwhile to do in unity as a dysfunctional American family in an age without endless content choices in which to fuel disconnection.

I am awarded the elusive clicker control in which to momentarily yield the sacred power of being able to change the station. Even though this era only offered four choices, really three as PBS at night was nearly always too boring to consider, this was a reward in youth that I took more pleasure in than money.

And then an anachronistic voice from now pierces through this bespoke vintage trance, instructing me to look for the Clorox wipes dispenser, remembering the staggering fact that this popular home device, known formally as a remote control, is laden with more fecal particles than a Port Authority public bathroom toilet seat.

I am awake to the present day, staring at the imposing walkway in front of my home from inside the taxi. It looks like an impossibly long path to my bed, where for the remainder of this ultra-marathon towards remission, I will continue to dream this simple dream as a coping mechanism for the immense fear in confronting my own mortality until I can resume my regularly scheduled programming, perhaps even better and stronger than before.

So that I can get back to the selfless art of obsessively worrying about global thermonuclear war, inequality, famine, global warming, and living long enough to view countless seasons of Better Call Saul and too many other shows to mention because it would just kill me not to know how everything plays out.