The Two Acres I Mowed on Chemo Week

Two days of phone calls

The next morning Riley found the cap in the barrel, and I went inside and started making calls.

If you have never tried to replace a specialty medication, I will tell you it is not like going to the drugstore.

The specialty pharmacy could not ship a new bottle until the insurance approved an early refill. The insurance would not approve an early refill without a lost medication override. The override needed a call from my doctor’s office.

Dr. Hall’s nurse, a kind woman named Gina, got on the phone with the insurance that afternoon. They wanted a written statement.

Then they wanted it on a different form. Then the person who could approve it had gone home for the day.

On the second day I sat on the back steps with the phone on speaker and listened to hold music for an hour and ten minutes.

A hummingbird kept coming to Riley’s feeder over my head, and I watched it the whole time so I would not cry.

Late on the second day the pharmacy called and said the override was approved and the bottle would ship overnight. There would be a replacement copay because it counted as a lost fill: four hundred and eighty dollars.

Four hundred and eighty dollars was most of a school bus driver’s paycheck, and I had not had one since May.

I put it on the card and thanked the woman, and then I went outside and sat in the grass by the garden and was sick in the tomato plants.

I had missed six doses. Gina said one missed stretch was not going to undo four months of treatment, and that I should just pick back up and not double anything.

I believed her about half the way. The other half lay awake at night counting.

The next cycle

The new bottle came on a Saturday in a cooler box, and I signed for it on the porch and held it against my chest like a newborn.

Norma did not come up the road. Duane went down there once, on a Sunday afternoon, and came back and said she was out in her yard pulling weeds and would not look at him.

Her grass was getting long. She had always paid a boy from church to mow it, and the boy had gone off to college at Morehead State the week before.

I noticed that. I filed it away.

My next infusion was a Monday in late August. Riley went to school on my old bus, with the substitute driver, a retired man named Mr. Pruitt.

I sat in the recliner at the cancer center for four hours with the drip going into the port under my collarbone.

That night I started my tablets again. Three after supper with a full glass of water. Three in the morning after a biscuit. Everything in its place.

Tuesday I was tired. Wednesday, day three, I lay on the couch and did not lift my head. I thought about Norma standing over me with her hands on her hips. Lazy.

Thursday I could sit up. And Friday after dinner, the way it sometimes does on day five, the fog lifted off me for a few hours like mist burning off a creek bottom.

I lay there and felt it lift. Then I got up and went out to the shed.