Part Fifty-Five: Week Three

            As always, the front desk personnel greet me with a smile.  (It only took a couple days before they knew me by name.)  Their friendly banter makes me feel welcomed.  The waiting room has been extra crowded lately, but no matter how busy it gets, they always smile and personally greet each person checking in.  It’s even getting so that I recognize some of the patients.

            There is the man in the wheelchair accompanied by his wife.  He is gregarious enough that I’ve heard his conversations from across the room.  This I know:  he is being treated for brain cancer, and he once lived in San Francisco.  Every day he is balder than the day before. 

            I meet the cheerful grandma, who has very short, curly hair, near the end of her treatments when she and her three-year-old granddaughter plunk down in the chairs next to me.   Across from us are two older women, possibly related; I can’t tell.  The one getting treatment has the sallow skin of someone who has very recently been on chemotherapy.  Her bald head has the very beginnings of hair growing back.  Her anger and depression hang over her countenance like a cloud.  She tells us that she stopped her chemo after only a few sessions because it made her too sick, and now she is starting radiation therapy.

            Across the crowded waiting room I see a white-haired gentleman with an open Bible on his lap.  He is holding his glasses in one hand as he wipes his eyes with the other.  I imagine that his wife is in for one of the imaging tests that are part of the work-up before cancer treatment begins.

            One afternoon as I enter the waiting area, I smell something pungent that I cannot place.  A few minutes after I sit down, still puzzling over the odor, a woman’s name is called.  As she walks past, the smell grows stronger, and then I place it:  the ammonia scent of a too-full kitty litter box.  I wonder how many cats she has and how bad her living conditions must be for her to carry that odor on her clothing.

            I myself am feeling rather low that day, but a pick-me-up is waiting for me down the hall.   From the changing room I enter the radiation room, my hospital gown clutched about me and the hard slab of a narrow table waiting for me to lie down upon it.  The technician greets me with his best maître d' voice, “Table for one?”

            “Yes, thank you,” I reply with a laugh.  He has just made my day.