Six Letter Word [Kaylor]

November 2016 (Part 3)

Author's Note: The following chapter contains medical content some readers may find somewhat difficult to read, regarding the stomach/intestinal side effects from chemotherapy. 

I was really glad Karlie had cleared her week between the treatment planning meeting and the first day of treatment. We needed some us time, and we needed some family time. After a brief tour of the infusion area, although we were indeed too late to meet the actual nurses and techs who would be part of my team, we headed upstate so Karlie could spend some time with her parents. From there we flew down to Florida to see my dad and enjoy some warm weather, only it was actually pretty damn cold and we largely just hung around the house, cooking out with my dad and trying not to freeze to death on the boat. We'd just been to Nashville, but we swung past Mom's on the way home, just to check in. At each stop, we had to go over the plans, a deliberate strategy suggested by Kar's therapist as a way to desensitize her to everything, and help her prepare herself for chemo actually starting. Our last stop was the house in Rhode Island, so we could have a couple of nights out of the city, just the two of us. We didn't have time to fly out to Big Sur, though we'd considered it before we realized what we really needed was family. So we did take a couple of days to honeymoon, something we really hadn't done since the wedding, but in the space where we'd gotten married. The plan was to return in a couple weeks for Thanksgiving, with both families gathering for one big Swift-Kloss holiday, assuming I felt up to it. It would be my second week of chemo and first week of radiation, though it wouldn't be a full week since even the radiation techs would take the holiday off, so we had no idea how I would feel. We were hoping I would be up for the holiday, and planning as though I would.

The morning of chemo was bright and clear, but cold. Because it was my first infusion, they wanted me early in the day, giving us daylight hours to try to fix any side effects or reactions. It was hard to really think about the fact that I was about to let doctors put chemicals in my body that they expected to cause more symptoms than the disease was causing, so I tried not to. I just told myself that the worse the side effects were, the better it was working. Not true, but not a bad fiction to tell myself. Karlie made me an omelet, with the theory that once again it would be better to have something in my stomach to throw up if the meds made me sick. There wasn't any joking around that morning. It felt like a pair of zombies navigating around our kitchen, not speaking, but still working together with a familiarity that came from years of cooking together. I still made coffee and cut vegetables, she still made the eggs. We just didn't know what to say, so we said nothing. The silence was deafening, broken only by the scrape of forks on plates, the clink of mugs on the marble counter top. We sat with empty plates in front of us, unsure how to proceed.

She wrapped her arms around me, resting her head on the top of mine. "I love you. This is hard. But you are stronger than you know, and I will do everything I can to make you even stronger. You've got this."

She turned me on my stool and kissed me, gently at first, then with strength behind it. "Don't know when you'll feel like doing that, but know I'm up for it, whenever," she quipped, then kissed me playfully on the nose. And she thinks she's not good with words. She knew exactly the right things to do and say to break the depressed mood we'd both woken up with. Intellectually, we knew this would go better if we could have a positive attitude, maybe even try to have fun with it, joke and dance and play around. But that was all easier said than done. Karlie loaded up a small cooler with flavored drinks, both carbonated and not, and some stomach-friendly foods like applesauce and those little jello cups. She tossed in granola bars and random snacks she knew I liked too, on the off chance that I preferred puking those up instead. It was sort of a foregone conclusion I was going to end up talking to Ralph on the porcelain phone, what we didn't know was how bad it would be, or what, in the end, would make me feel the least awful.