Whirl, click, click

My sister Holly greeted Sandie, my sister-in-law, and me at her door.  She looked a little tired, but surprisingly none the worse from the nasty chemo and radiation to treat the cancer invading her cervix.  She does walk a little funny though, I thought. 

“Look at my bruise,” she said, cocking her head to one side, revealing a large green bruise.  “The anathesialogist pricked me six times before announcing ‘I’m going to stick the I.V. in your neck.’  I didn’t believe him, and then he just poked me right there.”  She touched the sore spot.

“I would have kicked him,” Sandie said sympathetically.  She’d had plenty of experience in that area.  She’d had brain surgery a couple of years ago, resulting in five additional emergency surgeries to correct procedures gone wrong, and now is subjected to quarterly Botox injections at the base of her neck to relieve migraines.  I guess there’s some solice in knowing she’ll never wrinkle.

“I wanted to kick him,” Holly said, “but it would have been hard with tubing coming out of my neck.  The worst part was when they took the I.V. out and pulled the adhesive tape off my face and neck.”  Sandie was relating to Holly’s every word; I felt faint.

“So what was the internal radiation treatment like?” I asked.

“A physicist… can you believe not a doctor? …does the procedure.  He runs a Geiger counter over the area,” she explained.  “Afterwards you hear a whirl, click, click sound.” She made sounds like a helicopter and a car remotely locking.  “Then he runs the Geiger counter over the treated area again.”

“What’d he think he found?  Uranium,” I asked and answered.

“They were checking my level of radioactivity,” she explained.

“Maybe it’s the glitter,” I said.  All three of us remembered the joke about the lady who prepared for her gynecology appointment with a dusting of talcum powder, only to find out after her appointment she’d used her daughter’s glitter powder by mistake.  But none of us could remember the punch line.  We all laughed anyway.

“Then he repeated the procedures again,” Holly continued.  

“I thought the doctor was putting you out for the whole ordeal?” I questioned.

“They did put me out to stuff some junk inside me.”  No wonder she was walking a little funny.  “But I was awake during the radiation.  It didn’t hurt.  Afterwards the physicist pulled yards and yards of gauze out of me.”  She pulled one hand over the other to demonstrate.  She kept pulling like a magician pulling a silk scarf from his top hat.  Who knows maybe her doctor will show up on America’s Got Talent next year. 

“Does it feel like your insides are burning?” I asked.

“Or do you glow?” asked Sandie.

“Kind of like the burning bush?” I laughed.  Probably not appropriate, but it was just us girls…

I couldn’t strip her of the cancer like I so longed to do, take away her pain, or even promise her the doctor wouldn’t once again use the dreaded wad on her.  So I did the next best thing – handed her a home-baked oatmeal cookie.

Then she went upstairs and threw it up.  Damn, chemo!

Related posts:

1. The wad