Hello Goodbye

    The residents at our Hope Lodge are an ever-changing lot.  Every few days, we meet a couple of newbies who have just checked in.  You can spot them in the kitchens, nervously opening and closing drawers and cabinet doors, trying to find a measuring cup and hoping that they are going to get the hang of communal living soon.  (Actually, they hope that they will hang onto just plain living, given that everybody here is a draftee in the Cancer Army.)

    And, as some folks come on board, likewise, every couple of days, somebody else finishes up his or her long, long course of treatment.  Having rung that bell, these couples say goodbye to the rest of us at the lodge who are still doing time with the proton gizmo, the photon gizmo, or some other techie cancer zapper.

    When we were the newbies ourselves, with only a couple of treatments under our belts, we would chat with the old-timers, the ones who were coming close to wrapping up their 35 or so sessions.  We would say something like, "How wonderful that you'll be going home in just a few days!  You must be so excited!"

    To a person, they all mostly just looked back at us, slightly glassy-eyed.  Their replies were never as exuberant as I would have expected.  "Yeah, sure," they'd say.  "We're happy," they'd add, without a smile. 

    Where were the "yippees!" and "hurrahs!" I'd wonder.  Weren't they glad to be done?  Didn't they want to go home? Or were they just hiding their glee not to rub our faces in the fact that we were still hitched to the zapper machines with weeks left before we'd get sprung?

    Now, a couple of months later, we're the old timers ourselves, with just four treatments left to go.  And I understand their reactions completely.

    Some people, we now know, aren't all that jubilant because, while they may be finishing up one round of treatment, there is something else in the works (surgery, chemo, etc.).  Others are subdued because they know that they are still playing the long odds with cancer, so they are going home hoping that nobody is going to be writing an obituary about them at some point that starts with that awful phrase, "After a long and courageous battle ..."

    Some folks, like us, got the luckier outcomes.  We don't have another round of treatments to go through, and P.'s doctors feel confident that his proton treatment constitutes a near-100% chance of a complete cure.

    I can tell you, though, that we lucky ones are looking back just as glassy-eyed at the new folks who are telling us how great it is that we are going home soon.  Not because we aren't really, really, really happy to be finishing up, or that we aren't eager to get back to our lives.

     It's just that, after this many weeks of living in an alternate universe, we're all just tired.

    Next week, nonetheless, however wearily, we do plan to set off fireworks.  Since the lodge forbids flames of any kind, we'll have to make do with virtual sparklies. Preview below.