When you live in crisis mode, there is very little energy left for creative writing or even, for that matter, crappy writing. At the end of the day, there is just very little of anything left.

It's been over three months now and Sam's veins have hardened to the point that I can't touch his arms. They hurt too much. The oncologist's office where he gets chemo is on the third floor of Medical Building Two. We take the elevator because he is too tired to take the stairs, and I make several trips over the course of four hours, running back and forth between work and the hospital, bringing him his lunch about two hours into chemo and then picking him up two hours after that.

Many times I'm on the elevator with other patients, some heading to neurology, others to urology or reproductive medicine. I can usually guess the ones headed to oncology. They are often in a wheelchair, or bald, or over the age of fifty-five. We get off on the third floor together and I sometimes wonder what they think about us getting off with them, whether they're reminded of their kids who are our age, or even their grandkids.

Other times I am in the elevator with mothers and children who are always headed to floor two, pediatrics. Some carry a baby. Others hold hands with a preschooler. Sometimes they have both, juggling one on a hip and the other next to their leg. The babies sleep, while the mothers watch the floor numbers light up. They have seen their child sleep a million times before, but I haven't. Only later do I realize how similar the chemo patients look sleeping in their recliners, bald and exhausted, with a blanket pulled up to their chin.

The preschoolers who ride the elevator to floor two are constant motion, pushing buttons, fiddling with their bags, jumping from leg to leg, until the doors open and they burst out like a jack in the box. Their mother is barking orders, "just wait...don't touch that...slow down." She is weighed down with bags and a baby carrier and a lot more on her mind, not aware of my gaze, not aware that I didn't get off with her. She is too distracted by her four-year-old. She leaves, and I stay on, the door closing between us like a giant wall, the same wall I have tried to climb for many years now. I can't help but feel that little knot in my stomach, the same tight pull that reminds me that most of these women are my age and are headed to pediatrics, while I am headed to oncology. Then the doors close and I am left alone, on my way to floor three.

It's times like these that make me wonder how I got here, how my life changed in an instant, how I sit with sick, their veins dripping with heavy metals, toxic to their cancer, toxic to their own cells, when I should have been getting off on floor two.

I look at normal life as a pure blessing now, the humdrum of routine like the beating of my heart. It's only when the heart stops that I realize how much I miss it, how I long for the rhythm of daily routine. Normal life is breath and pulse. And the opposite of normal is suffocation.

I used to be afraid of the sick, of hospitals, of doctors, and everything that goes with it--all of it a reminder of my own mortality. And sometimes I still am. But at least, on good days, I am braver than before, even if it's just a little. When I'm not, then it's all I can do to push these fears to the back of my mind and focus on today, on healing, on the One who does the healing. But when I do, it is enough.
8:09:53 PM    

Strawberries too. I am getting handfuls from the garden and eating them on cheesecake or even in a cup of milk with a sprig of mint. The small ones are the best, sweet and flavorful. Some of the red gems are half buried in the dirt and I dig them out with dirty fingernails and put them in a plain paper bag to be washed later. They don't look like the oversized white ones at the grocery store. They are small, almost too small, but they taste like the sweet summer sun.

They are simple pleasures, a way of getting past my worry and focusing on what has been given to me. When you are in grief, there must be some way of enjoying life and being thankful.

Sometimes the small gifts are all you've got.
9:55:40 PM    

A pain here. A cough there. It passes by the normal, healthy people like a fly buzzing around their head, unnoticed. But for the sick and those who love them, it is a red light warning sign, a note scribbled on a messy tablet, "Something to tell the doctor."

Sam coughs four, maybe five before he falls asleep. It is deep and low, rattling his bones like the wind rattles an old attic window. Are his lungs failing? I wonder.

The warnings on the bleomycin drug card loop in my head like a recorded subway message: "Report persistent dry cough or shortness of breath to your physician or nurse," except that my brain gets stuck on the dry cough part and forgets the rest. I find I'm forgetting a lot of things these days.

I sleep ever so lightly, my ears alert. I listen for his breathing: in, out, in, out. If I don't hear it, I move closer to him my head next to his, listening for the movement of air. It is faint, like a breeze whispering through the willow tree in our backyard, its branches rustling like sand. Swish, swish.

The doctor asks if he's had problems with coughing as she listens to his lungs the next day. I tell her, he coughed four times last night. She doesn't think I'm crazy, but I feel like a paranoid old coot. This is what happens to you when your husband is sick. You become as crazy as a bat.

"It might have been something..." then she waves her hand in the air, near her throat, showing me it could have been anything. It makes me feel better, if only for a moment.

"You've come a long way Sam," she says.

It is a small thing to say, but for us it is pure bliss, enough to survive on another day. This is how we live now, on moments of bliss.

For the cancer patient, bliss is a day with no shots, or maybe having a needle stick you only once. Bliss is watering the plants or folding clean laundry and not needing a nap afterward. It's a night of sleeping, instead of tossing and turning. And it's your wife sleeping too, instead of laying awake with her eyebrows knotted up. It's a letter in the mailbox saying, "Fight this disease with prayer and determination" and then seeing that letter again on a bad day. It's children who see past baldness and instead say, "I like your haircut." It's those same children who pray for your sick body to get better, never for once doubting that it won't happen. Is this what Jesus meant when he said, "For the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these"?

Children believe in miracles because they are untainted by the world's cynicism. Even children with cancer don't know to be sick. They go on dancing while the world looks on astonished, our mouths gaping open. Is this what gives sick children a higher survival rate? Could joy be the healing balm of the sick?

"A merry heart is good medicine," says the old Proverb, but it is hard to be merry these days. We are learning to live on the small joys, those moments of bliss that come hidden in the miniscule packages of life. We dance like fools even when we do not feel like it. We dance to be well again.
9:35:18 PM