The Chemo Calendar I Handed His Daughter

How we got to that kitchen

Les Sorensen was a lineman for the rural electric for thirty-four years. He climbed poles in ice storms all over Dodge and Burt counties, and he came home with frost in his eyebrows and never once complained about it at supper.

He retired at sixty. He was sixty-three that September when the colonoscopy he had put off for four years finally found what it found.

The doctor in Fremont called us both into his office, and I knew by the way he sat down.

Stage three colon cancer. They took out part of his colon at the hospital in Lincoln in early October.

The surgeon said it went well, and then the oncologist sat us down and explained the chemo, and that was when it got real.

The regimen had a name made of initials that I never could keep straight. Fourteen treatments, one every two weeks, about six months start to finish.

Each one meant a morning in the infusion chair, and then he came home wearing a pump that ran another forty-six hours.

The pump was a little gray box in a pouch on his belt, with a line running up under his shirt to the port they had put in his chest.

On Thursdays a home health nurse from Fremont came out to the house to unhook it.

I work admitting at the hospital in Fremont. I have sat at that desk for nineteen years and typed in the insurance cards of half the county.

I know what a cancer diagnosis does to a household, because I have watched it walk through my sliding doors.

I just had never watched it walk through my own kitchen.

The night after the oncologist, Les sat at the table with his reading glasses on his forehead and the folder of papers in front of him. He said, “I don’t want Michelle told. Not yet.”

I put my cup down. “Les, she’s your daughter.”

“I know who she is.” He rubbed his eyes. “She did this already, Gail. She did it with her mother. Every weekend for a year, up and down that highway. I’m not putting her through it again unless I have to.”

Janet, his first wife, died of ovarian cancer when Michelle was thirty-six. Les and Janet had been divorced for years by then, but Michelle had driven from Omaha to Norfolk every single weekend for a year to sit with her mother.

Les told me once that by the end, Michelle weighed less than her mother did. He said it like a man describing a barn fire he couldn’t get to in time.

“After the first scan,” he said that night. “If it’s clear, I’ll tell her it’s handled. If it isn’t, I’ll tell her everything. But not now. Let her have her winter.”

I told him I thought it was a mistake. I said it plainly, twice.

And then I did what you do when it is your husband’s body and your husband’s child and your husband’s decision. I let him have it.

The calendar

The cancer center gave us a printed calendar, but I didn’t trust it. I bought a big paper one at the drugstore in Fremont, the kind with the wide boxes, and hung it inside the cupboard door by the phone.

I wrote every treatment in. Every lab draw. Every Thursday the nurse was coming to unhook the pump.

Every scan, every follow-up, every pharmacy refill. By the end of October that calendar looked like a farm wife’s egg ledger.

I wrote other things on it too, little notes to myself in the margins, because chemo brain is real and it was not only the patient who had it.

I was running on four hours of sleep and gas station coffee.

Leave by 5:15. Labs at 6:30. Gloves. Warm water in the thermos, not cold. Ginger candies, the lemon ones. Pull over at mile 40. Garage level 3 by the elevator.

That last line took me three treatments to figure out. The parking garage at the cancer center fills from the bottom, and by seven in the morning the first two levels are gone and you’re circling.

Level three had a row of spots right by the elevator. If you got one, Les only had to walk forty feet instead of two hundred, and by treatment four, forty feet was what he had in him.

Mile marker 40 was something else. Highway 79 runs north out of Lincoln up through Valparaiso and on toward North Bend, and we live a few miles outside North Bend. The mile markers count up as you head home.