Seismic Waves

In California I was taught to stand under a door frame. I remember centering myself, arms stretched at my sides, legs apart. If the building fell down, the frame would stand, and the frame and I would survive together.

My mom asks me how I prepare. Her English is very formal—she speaks as those who acquired it as a second language. Few contractions, formal words, careful sentences with adjectives only sometimes in the wrong order. “What are the necessary preparations the day before? What arrangements do you make?”

She is trying to be helpful and I can’t quite answer. I suppose we’ve got a system now, unspoken, for the chemo days. The day before is usually lovely, and lazy. We do something we’ve wanted to do— go out to eat, watch a movie, take the dogs to the park. Eat huge meals, all three. I get other things in order between, in case I’m out for the week. Our refri and freezer are stocked with juice, popsicles and ice cream for the nausea. We decide what we’ll do during the drip—watch a DVD, read together— and Patricia packs the bag. I choose comfortable clothes that I can pass out in when we get home. I drink water to excess, thinking I’ll spare my bladder, liver and kidneys the damage from the Cytoxan. I make lists of questions to ask the doctor; try to remember the trajectory of blood counts.

I brace myself. I don’t get used to the feeling. Each time we drive down Lomas towards the hospital, each time we ride the elevator to the fifth floor, each time I check in with the OTC nurses, who greet us with wide smiles, the sort reserved for the old or the ill, both kind and sad, each time, I wish I could turn back. Start the year again—avoid the chest cold, the virus, avoid the restlessness, the long drive home from Dallas, the strain of grades and applications and family. Instead, I settle in to the oversized reclining chair, arrange the IV pole, tuck my feet under myself and smile weakly to the rest of the room.

I now have a port, a central line to my heart. This was ‘installed’ awhile back to administer the chemotherapy more efficiently and to spare me pokes and angling for a vein that often took the better part of an hour, once resulting in the piercing of my artery. So now a small node in my chest is ever-ready for the drip—this makes tight or low cut shirts an impossibility and has transformed firm hugs into deep aches. It feels like a hook, pulling downward as I walk. Still, the port is supposed to make my time at the hospital slightly less and avoids the sore forearms and choked back pain.

My restlessness builds the more I try to compose myself, to hold still, to breathe in. On Tuesdays in the chemo ward, falling objects, ceiling tiles, lights, brick and mortar, and me and Patricia in the door frame, wrists strained, legs braced.