Confessions of a Cancer Caregiver
Quasi soft-core porn, hospital bed spooning, and top-notch juice boxes.
First came moaning that put Meg Ryan to shame. Then came the dirty talk. Then came the full-on sex acts playing on my laptop. No, this wasn’t an afternoon adventure on PornHub; it was my wife and I watching a TV show in her hospital bed. Awkward.
As I walked the hospital hall with my melancholy stride to go home tonight, I laughed to myself. The scene above, unfortunately, describes our new normal. After spending 18-hours alone in the Emergency Room, Alicia just wanted to cuddle with me and watch a TV show. No different than at home. Except for the IV, nurses, COVID masks, and her roommate, who needed to have a bowel movement before she was allowed to go home. You must love hospital rooms.
My job is to care for my wife. It’s the hardest yet most rewarding job I’ve ever had.
My job is to care for my wife. It’s the hardest yet most rewarding job I’ve ever had. I poured myself into my car tonight. The sheer duration of this battle has worn me to the ground. I’m tired. My bones hurt. My heart is heavy, and my brain is mush. But I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I need to rush home to try and make it before bedtime because no one can read Charlie and Chocolate Factory quite like me. My teenage stepdaughters have stepped up their game and are pulling the big-sister mid-shifts like champs. Every day Alicia is in the hospital, I’m trying to figure out how to keep their spirits up and ensure they still enjoy their teenage years. It’s hard.
Part of my job is to be motivator-in-chief. Some days I just can’t do it. Tonight was one of those nights.
This was Alicia’s third night in the hospital with post-chemotherapy complications. It started with our third trip to the dreaded Emergency Room, where loved ones are forbidden and patients are forgotten. Except for this time, they made her stay. She is being held until her body can successfully fight off a wave of fevers on its own. Alicia has Hairy Cell Leukemia (HCL). For HCL patients, a post-chemo fever can be deadly.
I’ve been watching my wife for five days break out into blistering fevers and plunge into bone-shivering chills. Twelve blankets, wooly socks, and hoodies go on, then fans whirl, ice packs sweat, and covers go flying just as fast. She’s suffering. She’s frustrated. And there isn’t shit I can do about it. In a word, this sucks.
What most people don’t realize is cancer is a grind. My friend Johnny “Moutz” Moutzouridis has HCL, and on day one, he told me, “I love baseball. Baseball is a grind. Baseball is like life. Life is a grind. And then you get cancer. Then you know what a real grind is.” Word.
What I’ve learned about cancer is you must focus on where you can make an impact. I can’t make the fevers go away, but I can jump into a cramped hospital bed and pretend for a bit that all of this isn’t happening.
When I get to that hospital room and see my wife alone, much skinnier than she was a month ago, tired and feeling helpless because she just knows she’ll never get out of this damn room, I change. I’m less tired and less frustrated. I’m ready. Ready for whatever she needs.
What does she need? Me kicking off my shoes and jumping in her hospital bed and holding her.
I figured out how to play dual Bluetooth headphones on my MacBook, and she picked a show on HBOMax, Mrs. Fletcher. Seemed harmless enough. Uh, wrong. Let’s just say Mrs. Fletcher definitely comes from the “Max” portion of that partnership, harkening back to the days of “Skinemax.” While the screen content is a tad embarrassing, no one is really paying attention.
Nor are they paying attention to us cuddling in her hospital bed. I kissed her probably a hundred times the first night there. When it came time to leave, I put my shoes and sweatshirt on and noticed that it felt a little like leaving your high-school girlfriend’s couch when her parents got home. I kind of extra straightened my shirt out before leaving.
But just like in high school, I don’t want to leave. Leaving means returning to reality, and I’m clearly not ready for that. How not ready am I? I’m so not ready that within an hour’s time, I leave the gas station with the hose still in my car, angrily pass a puttering Prius at 80 mph, missing my exit and causing a 5-mile detour and blow by a CHP officer at 90 mph (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory calls). I’m a menace and should be off the roads.
Earlier that morning, I forgot to put the damn Elf on the shelf, nearly crushing our toddler’s Christmas spirits. I’m not prepared for this. We did not discuss an Elf on the Shelf contingency plan in case Alicia couldn’t be there. My decision to stage a scene that made it look like Elf Sparkle went on a bender and overslept, thus not being in place, is obviously questionable. I’m not right.
What I really struggle with is I don’t want to come home to eat dinner alone. I don’t want to watch TV without Alicia, and I don’t want to think about her hooked to machines, alone and broken, because she knows sleep will never come. I don’t want to go to sleep either because then I’ll have to start this all over again.
I’m a caregiver. Feeling sorry for myself doesn’t get my job done. Tomorrow I’ll make a cup of coffee, breathe in its aromas, and will get back to work. A job I love. As Johnny “Moutz” said, it’s a grind. Well, I am Alicia’s grinder in chief. And no grind is complete without a goal.
Tomorrow, my goal is to pilfer the hospital juice boxes Alicia loves before we snuggle up for the next Skinemax episode. If biscuits and gravy doesn’t cure cancer, maybe gratuitous full-frontal nudity and juice boxes will?
