I didn’t always recognize its importance. I mean, when I was younger, I thought that being attractive, slim, athletic, and articulate were surefire antidotes to one’s suffering a life of mediocrity. I just never recognized the value of something I took for granted, my sense of humor. And then life happened.
When I was thirty-six, my husband (who was older by twelve years) was diagnosed with lung cancer. Inoperable, incurable, his type of cancer meant that he had only months to live. Oncologists at the hospital devised a protocol for him: every month he entered the hospital for a seven-day cisplatinum infusion drip, delivered via an intravenous tube mounted on a five-footed device that could be wheeled around, if he felt up to any kind of exercise.
That usually wasn’t the case, as the treatments made him violently ill. He generally lay in his hospital bed, where I could almost see the chemo oozing out his pores. I visited him, following my work day, trying to take the edge off those punishing treatments, injecting humor into a scenario where there was little. (Ultimately he succumbed to the disease.)
The regimen was tough. These chemo warriors stayed in the hospital for their seven-day treatment, recovered at home the following week, had a week off, and returned to the hospital the fourth week, to begin, the punishing cycle anew. Such a plan wrought havoc with patient psyches, for each time they returned to the hospital for the next round, they discovered some within their group had succumbed to their disease in the interim. Depression rode alongside hope.
When my husband began the process, his roommate, Joe, had already weathered five rounds of this treatment, trying to stop the ravages of liver cancer. He lay in the neighboring bed, white sheets snuggling his skinny frame; he was all of ninety pounds. The toll on him was all too evident.
Every afternoon, Joe’s wife, Maria, arrived at around four, following her part-time job at a local market. Like the dutiful Italian wife she was, she kissed him upon entry to the room and then got out the tools of her trade. She opened a tin of “meat-a-balls,” set up the portable pot she kept in Joe’s clothes cabinet, and proceeded to bubble them until they were piping hot. The aroma wafted down the hallways. And what would have created gustatory anticipation anywhere else provoked just the opposite on the cancer wing of floor 4 at Roger William Hospital, in Providence. Here, patients pumped full with chemo concoctions reeled in their beds, nauseous with the fumes; they simply couldn’t stand Maria’s good intentions.
