Journal: May 2002

Wednesday is another quiet day.  But quiet days are what I need.  I buy a pound of fresh shrimp from a local fishmonger.  I boil it up, chill it down, and chase it with cold local beer as I watch ships entering the channel in the twilight. On Thursday afternoon I make the thirty-mile trip to the airport.  The time at home with her family has been cathartic for Tish.  Though I have spoken with her every day since she left, she recounts in greater detail the events and rituals and stories that comprised the past four days for her.  On Friday and Saturday we went sightseeing, including a dolphin-watching cruise off Tybee, followed by a seafood buffet at Bubba Gumbo’s on the creaky shrimp boat marina on Lazaretto Creek.

On Saturday one of Tish’s sisters, Sandy, and her husband,Dave, stopped by to spend the night on their way to Florida to visit Tish’s parents. In the morning we went to Easter Mass at St. John the Baptist Cathedral in downtown Savannah, a 130-year-old cathedral presided over by the Bishop of Savannah.  We strolled lazily through the shaded 200-year-old streets of old Savannah before Sandy and Dave continued on their journey.  Driving back to Tybee, Tish and I decided to challenge the 143-foot tall Tybee Island lighthouse.  This was to be my litmus test.  I had put it off until the end of our time there.  I had hoped that three weeks of Monday injections of Procrit would boost my hemoglobin up to level of the task.  But ascending even the condo’s three flights was not getting any easier.  Nonetheless I made it to the top of the old lighthouse by stopping to rest on each of the five landings.  It was windy but scenic at the top.  We traversed the outdoor circular walkway just beneath the nine foot, first-order Fresnel lens at the structures glassed summit.

On Monday we drove the two hundred miles north to Columbia, South Carolina where my brother’s family now included my 105-year-old grandmother.  We had a comfortable two days, watched Indiana University get beaten in the final game of the national basketball championship, and visited with my Grandmother.  She thought that I would be completely recovered from my illness.  Having lived through the Great Depression and having seen her parents lose their home; she was distressed to learn that I was still not working back at the hospital.  My 60% disability checks started in March.

We left Columbia early Wednesday morning with the urgency of needing to pick Aaron up that evening upon his return from Russia.  It was another warm and sunny day as we left the South on our 600-mile drive to the considerably colder north.  I knew what I was returning to.  My mind began to be clouded not only by the prospect of colder, murkier weather, but by the bulk of all the problems and anxieties engendered by my illness.  I discovered that I had managed to leave most of this behind me.  Not everything, but most of it.  During my vacation I was seldom unaware of my illness.  I was chronically tinged by my dis-ease.  But the burden seemed lighter on holiday, as well it should.
As the sky darkened and the temperature dropped, crossing the Ohio River into Indiana it felt to me as if it were time to return, to face the music, to take up anew the burden of the cancer patient.  To stay away longer would seem like cheating.  Arriving home that evening would mean another four days in limbo preparing for a week of tests, preparing for whatever answer these tests might deliver.   Change, change, change … to every season under heaven.

cancer