The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

Riley came around the corner of the house at seven in the morning with something cupped in both hands, walking slow and careful across the wet grass, the way she used to carry baby birds when she was little.

I was sitting on the back steps with a cup of ginger tea I could not drink. It was the fourth day after my infusion, and the morning air was the only thing that kept my stomach where it belonged.

“Mama,” she said. She held her hands out. In them was a white plastic pill cap, half melted, and a curl of scorched paper with the edge of a pharmacy label still on it.

I knew the label before I read it. I had looked at it twice a day for four months. My name, Robin Tackett, and below it the word I had learned to say like a prayer: capecitabine.

“It was in the burn barrel,” Riley said. “Under the ashes. Grandma burned the trash yesterday before she left.” She was twelve years old, and her chin was shaking, and she was trying hard not to let it.

I set the tea down on the step. I took the cap out of her hands and turned it over. The childproof ridges had run together like candle wax.

There was nothing else. The bottle, the tablets, all of it, gone up in the smoke I had smelled the afternoon before and thought nothing of.

“Is that your chemo?” Riley asked.

“It was,” I said. Then, because she was looking at me the way children look at you when they are deciding how scared to be, I put my arm around her and said, “It’s all right. They make more. I’ll call them this morning.”

That was the first lie I told my daughter that week. It was not all right, and it took three days.

The bottle

I should tell you what was in that bottle, because it matters, and because a few people later said to me, “Well, it was just pills.”

I was diagnosed in February with stage 3 colon cancer. I was thirty-eight. I drove a school bus for Lewis County, the same route for nine years, up the hollows off Route 10 and back down to the elementary in Vanceburg.

A surgeon in Lexington took the tumor out in March, and by mid-April I had started chemo. My oncologist in Morehead, Dr. Hall, put me on a regimen that came in three-week cycles. Day one was an infusion at the cancer center.

Then fourteen days of capecitabine tablets, twice a day, morning and evening, and then one week off to let my body catch up.

The tablets were the part people did not understand. They looked like nothing. Peach colored, oval, a little chalky.

Three of them in the morning and three at night, swallowed with a full glass of water within thirty minutes after I ate. Every dose mattered.

They came from a specialty pharmacy, shipped overnight in a cooler box. The list price on the paperwork was a little over three thousand dollars for a cycle.

Our insurance through Duane’s job covered most of it. I still thought about that number every time I opened the cap.

Duane is my husband. He is forty, a maintenance mechanic at the power plant up at Maysville, and in August that plant runs hard because everybody in three states has their air conditioner on. He was working twelve-hour shifts, five and six days a week.

He would have stayed home with me. I would not let him.

Somebody had to keep the insurance, and somebody had to keep the lights on, and the plant was not going to hold his job for a man whose wife was only sick, not dying.

That was where Norma came in.