A True Goodbye
“As I shook hands with them and said goodbye, I said what cancer patients always say to each other in those situations: 'Good luck. I hope I don't see you again.'”
I hit the bell today in the hospital corridor. It's one of those chimes made out of an oxygen bottle or something like that, and when you whack it with a mallet, it gives out a nice clear tone. My newest friends, who were standing with me, all cheered, and you could hear applause coming from the waiting rooms. That's what you do when you've completed your last radiation treatment. You hit the bell.
It had been a long day. We arrived to find that the machine was down, and it would be five hours before I would finally lie down on that table for the last time. But in the last couple of weeks we all became friends as we waited together each day, so the time actually passed pretty quickly. Some of the other patients are getting chemo at the same time as radiation. That's a tough load. They went off to chemo and then made their way back to radiation, each now with the telltale blue tape around a wrist.
As I shook hands with them and said goodbye, I said what cancer patients always say to each other in those situations: "Good luck. I hope I don't see you again." That's not being rude. It's saying that you hope they make it, that there won't be more treatment, that we won't run into each other waiting for some other form of therapy.
And it's true. I genuinely like the members of our temporary group. I will miss them. But I truly hope we never see each other again.
7:30 AM ET | 04-15-2008 | permalink
