Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [154]
On the first day of chemotherapy, Anne O’Connor put us in a small room on the clinical trials hall and went to find the nurse technician. She came back in with Mercedes Watson. Mercedes is tall, and dark-skinned with a pretty face, and eight different hairdos—one for each of my eight sessions over the next fifteen weeks. She was strong and cheerful, a perfect match for us or for anyone needing to feel that all good things were still possible. It is said that cancer is a disease that hits the whole family. Well, Mercedes signed on, too; she would be part of our family for this fight.
Throughout the treatments, she was by my side, telling me what she was doing, no matter how obvious it was, and telling me what I could expect to feel. Between her lessons and warnings, she would fill the silence with stories about her family or her house or the weather. As Christmas approached, it was what could she get her son or how much help her daughter had been wrapping presents. I would talk about wrapping presents with Cate—in our hectic lives lately that usually meant staying up till 4 A.M. on Christmas Eve wrapping gifts that would be unwrapped at 7 A.M.—and it turned out Mercedes and her daughter did the same thing. The one thing the conversations would not be about was cancer. It was as if we had both come early to a PTA meeting, and although we didn’t know each other well enough to talk of real intimacies, we knew we had something in common, so we talked about life in a general easy way. Just like at PTA.
So here John and I were—a week after the election, a week after private planes and hairstylists, after Secret Service and buttons with our photos on them, a week after stages and television cameras—here we were, the two of us, in the most spartan of hospital rooms. One bed. One chair. A doorway to the corridor, through which we would watch as passing patients or staff would casually look in, then slow or circle back for a second and third walk-by as they tried to figure out if that man in the jeans and sweater really was John Edwards. A side table for my soda and Mercedes’ supplies. An IV pole. And a single window out of which we couldn’t see much except the weather.
The first four chemotherapy sessions—one every two weeks—would be injections of two drugs. These drugs, I knew, were going to kill all growing cells in my body. I was warned they were going to make my nights uncomfortable and my days unpleasant. I would feel tired and sore. I would bruise and bleed, my skin would change, my nails would yellow, I would feel nauseous, and I would get sores in my mouth. And my hair would fall out. I could not wait to get started. I wanted to be a warrior.
Can you go to war while you are sleeping? Because if you cannot, I was not actually a warrior. The first drug Mercedes gave me each visit was something to stop nausea. It worked—I was never nauseous—but it also made me sleep. If there was an expected side effect, good or bad, of any drug they gave me, I experienced it. Once when I had a day surgery, the doctor, who had warned me that the anesthetic could cause nausea, hadn’t listened to his own warning. As he was leaning over to tell me I was fine and could go home, I threw up all over his shoes. My white blood cell count was supposed to go down during chemotherapy, and it did. So I gave myself injections at home to keep the count up, and that worked, too. The Taxol I was later administered could cause an allergic reaction that, if it occurred, would show up at the first dose, turning my torso and face red. And it did. In a few minutes, fortunately, the redness faded. Anemia? I had it. So when Mercedes started whatever medicine made me sleep, I would drift off on cue, while Mercedes told stories about the deer in