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