Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [155]
I knew that I would lose my hair. In my battle against victimization, I cut it off before it fell out. Kevin, who cut my hair and later went shopping for wigs with me, came over and shaved my head the week before my hair was supposed to fall out. Jack and John volunteered to let Kevin cut theirs off, too, but I convinced them it wouldn’t help me to see more bald people in my family. I felt they were a part of this fight without going through this sweet gesture of solidarity.
The loss of hair appeared to be the only part of cancer and cancer treatments that interested the younger children. When I first cut my hair off, I let them watch and then rub their hands on the little fuzz that Kevin had left. They were expecting my bald head, actually anticipating it with eagerness because I had sat them down weeks earlier and talked about my cancer before the news of it was released to the press.
“Mommy has a bump,” I said. “And that bump is called cancer. Cancer is very bad, but I will get rid of the bump and the cancer by taking really strong medicine.”
They looked bored. Somber, but bored. Or maybe just bored.
“And that medicine is so strong that it will make my hair fall out.”
I think it cheered them up. “Your hair’s gonna fall out? All of it? When? Can I see?”
The children never acted scared, and we never talked about the fact that some people die of cancer. When, on the news, they were announcing somebody’s death from cancer, as when Peter Jennings died or when Dana Reeve lost her fight, we’d switch the channel immediately. Cancer can still kill me, but there’s no reason for them to spend their days—or nights—thinking that it will.
I thought—wrongly it turned out—that we had painted a rosy, even funny picture of the upcoming fight with cancer. But they were knocked more off balance by my primary-school rendition of my disease than I had suspected, particularly Emma Claire, who was six years old. It would show up in a letter she would write or in the answer to a teacher’s question. There her Christmas wish would be for me to be better, for cancer not to hurt me anymore. But with me, she was always stoic. If we all acted strong with one another, it was easier for each of us to actually be strong. So we did. Even Emma Claire, at age six.
Our trips to the hospital for chemotherapy would start before nine in the morning with bloodwork. Though I was in a major hospital, it was like the scene from a low-budget film, some actors playing multiple parts. The fellow taking my paperwork at the reception desk, Desi Ravonimanantsoa, would clock me in, wait a few minutes, stand up and call my name, and then walk me back to the blood-drawing room, where he would put on gloves and, now the technician and no longer the receptionist, take my blood. There were regulars, too, patients on the same schedule I was on. Each visit, Anne O’Connor would ask whether I had seen my boyfriend that day. My “boyfriend” was a large man about twenty years older than I who would give me a chocolate candy out of his Captain Kangaroo pockets each time I saw him in the blood-drawing room. Nothing like candy with a morning blood draw.
I would see Dr. Warren for an examination before getting to my chemotherapy room and Mercedes by 10 A.M. We would be in that room until 2, or 3, or even 4 P.M. We would have a rare visitor. Cate’s boyfriend from college, Trevor, a medical student at Georgetown, came to see us in our little room, and Zam-Zam Murad, the other nurse technician, would stop by to check on us. But mostly it was just us, and it was quiet. The change from our previous intense, high-pressure, busy, people-filled campaign existence to our new intense, high-pressure, slow-paced, lonely disease-fighting existence was at no time more noticeable than when