Thanks for Holding Us In the Light / Our Night of Hard Knocks

Leslie and I want to start this posting with thanks to so many friends who called or wrote this past week with messages of encouragement as we entered the final cycle of chemo.

When we’ve written about the few good things that have emerged from this difficult experience, we’ve usually focused on our embracing community of friends and colleagues.  Inseparable from that, however, has been Leslie’s and my growing realization that we can, indeed, feel the buoyant waves of that community’s thoughts and prayers.  As children of scientists and a journalist, we can at times have doubts about that which can’t be seen or proven; your constant love and cheerleading (not to mention soup, chili, wine and more!) erode our skepticism and propel us forward.

Your “holding us in the light” (as the Quakers say) was indispensable yesterday.

Leslie has written here about the specter of the unknown; however (and with no hat tip at all to Donald Rumsfeld), sometimes the known is equally daunting.  Leslie walks out the door each week (i.e., I have yet to have to carry or drag her) to deliver herself to chemo sessions she knows will be uncomfortable, painful and debilitating.  Since she doesn’t like the word “heroic,” in the car yesterday morning we coined the term “braverageous” – a little bit “brave,” a little bit “courageous”…with perhaps a soupçon of “outrageous” in the olio.

Ironically, yesterday’s Day One of Cycle Six was the most challenging yet for Leslie.  As soon as we arrived at the lab, she lay on the bed unable to control her anxieties; she was a bit teary, her legs were shaking and just looking at the (individually and collectively wonderful) chemo nurses made her feel sick.  She added an anti-anxiety pill to her pre-treatment cocktail, and quickly dropped off to sleep.  This is quite unusual; she is generally made groggy by the Benadryl given to protect against allergic reaction to the Taxol, but seldom really sleeps.  Her loud snoring confirmed that she was, indeed, out for almost three hours.

The nap revived Leslie’s spirits, and she was upbeat for the remainder of the treatment – visiting with a friend, joking with her supervising nurse, and eating a healthy portion of Indian food for lunch.  As she finished, she celebrated that she never, ever has to go through a Day One (Taxol and Cisplatin, intravenous and intraperitoneal) again.

Once home, we passed a quiet afternoon working, reading and napping.  We watched the World Series Game 7, then retired…and that’s when the night’s adventure began.

I was asleep but Leslie wasn’t when, around 11:15, someone began banging on our front door.  This wasn’t knocking, but banging and kicking and, after almost 10 minutes, adding the doorbell (insert Christopher Walken saying, “more doorbell”).  Leslie (braver or more foolish than me) raised our bedroom window and saw a young woman, in a dress meant for weather 40 degrees warmer than last night’s near freeze, tottering on under-the-influence-of-something legs at our door.  Leslie called out to ask what she wanted, and the only word she said was, “Open.”

At that point, we dialed 911 and the Chicago police showed up in minutes.  They very gently (kudos to them) questioned the woman about where she thought she was and where she wanted to be.  They talked for about 10 minutes, trying to get a coherent answer to their questions and to examine her ID.  When the University of Chicago police joined the group, they established that she was a student, and coaxed her into the UC squad car.  We called out thanks to the police and went back to sleep (myself faster than Leslie).

I’ve had this odd feeling all day that the young woman will show up at our doorstep to apologize; Leslie believes, far more probably, that she couldn’t find her way back here to save her life.  Though, perhaps, some day she’ll be walking down our street and wonder why that one house looks so oddly familiar.