A cancer caused love story
The hospital origin story of how I met my wife
In honor of Valentine’s Day, please enjoy a story that I never get sick of telling, so I hope you enjoy it too. And if you do, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to get each post delivered direct to your inbox. Good Marrow is a reader-supported newsletter and is fueled by your eyeballs. As always, thanks for reading.
They told me to pack a suitcase. A four-walled hospital room would be my home for a month or more as I moved in for my stem cell transplant—the length of my vacation depended on how my body would respond to my new immune system.
It was April 2015 and my leukemia had been put at bay with an initial, lengthy hospital stay and a few months of consolidation chemo as I waited for a bone marrow donor to be found—and now it had. Sort of. A match was found via two separate baby’s umbilical cord blood, which was ready to be jettisoned into my veins in hopes that my life would begin again.
I entered my room to find my nurse already there. She was around my age—myself on the younger side for most cancer wards, having just turned the corner on twenty-six. She introduced herself and told me that she was going to get me started on some fluids and a steroid.
I had just come from Interventional Radiology where I had gotten a vascular catheter placed, a direct line into my body for the chemotherapy and a fitting metaphor for my emotional state—most days it felt like there was a hole near my heart. But I smiled, nodded, and introduced myself—though my chart told her all that she needed to know about me.
I was habitually overcome with a sheepish instinct whenever I was assigned a female nurse around my age. Bald and waylaid, I couldn’t beat back the self-consciousness of once being an able bodied and eligible young man. I always tried to give an icebreaker amount of polite charisma—not in the name of flirtation, but more so as a last grasp at the old me that kept slipping farther away.
But she was just trying to do her job and I was trying not to jump out of my skin as the steroid sent my heart rate creeping up, so I kept quiet and unpacked my sweatpants, instead catching her name on the whiteboard.
Her name was Emily.
I had begun my cancer journey five months earlier with not just a failing body but a flagging heart. My leukemia diagnosis had come a few months after a breakup with a girlfriend of five years. It was the relationship that had followed me from college into the working world, the two of us moving across the country to try and make it in the bright lights of Hollywood.
We were still trying to extricate ourselves from each other’s lives when the cancer hit. The elephant in the hospital room led to a confused emotional stew and an additional layer of existential grief on top of my body’s descent into neutropenia.
But by the time I had relocated to Chicago, to live with my parents and prep for the transplant, distance had made the heart grow tougher. Those last lingering fibers were eventually broken by absence and whatever short list of doctor-approved diversions that I could conjure up.
It would be a lie to say I was busy worrying about bigger things, because cancer and loneliness are peas in a pod, and while survival was at the top of the list, it was hard not to feel as if the universe had added insult to injury—the cancer serving as entrée to a three-course punishment of mind, body, and soul.
Emily leaned over to do a brief physical exam—she listened to my breathing, checked for mouth sores, and squeezed my fingers and toes in search of capillary refill. My nerves thankfully remained intact enough to acknowledge the gentle touch of another human being. My eyes flitted, not wanting to linger too long, but between curt answers I swear I saw it in her eyes.
That gentle, almond shape. Those features formed from both here and there. A sense of unspoken connection. I thought to myself, I think she’s half-Asian too. And while I trusted my radar, I knew the oblique ways in which “what are you” could engender annoyance at best, revulsion at worst. It was still too early to ask. We had only just met and we had a lot to do.
She rolled the computer over to the bed and went through a number of requisite new admission tasks—one of which was the questionnaire. Covering drug and alcohol consumption, sexual history, emotional health and safety, relationships with family, friends, and caregivers—it was perhaps the most effective and clinical way to speed date.
The probing questions were thankfully easier to answer. To any and all categories that might raise an eyebrow, my illness and perfectionist desire not to give cancer an easy win made everything an easy no. Drinks? Not in months. Smoke? Nope. Sexual history? Sadly none lately. Relationship with parents? Great. Safe at home? Yes, just a bit bored.
I attempted winsome answers as were appropriate while Emily charted the data of my life, the long stretches when she typed giving me time to wonder what this girl thought about this skinny young man, bald and full of cancer, myself flushed with embarrassment that I would even consider my plunging compatibility rating.
But she smiled and finished up. And then she told me she’d be back tomorrow. And for the first time in awhile, the long night ahead got a little bit shorter.
Emily returned twice more, having been assigned to me three days in a row, a coincidence that felt serendipitous from the start.
On the second day I drew up the courage to ask if she was half-Asian, or Hapa, as is known to those who know. She said yes. I smiled and said me too, to which she politely nodded and said “I know” as the camera panned over to my parents entering the room—two very obvious indicators of how I came to be.
On the third day, I awoke in my antiseptic bubble with a hint of anticipation, knowing that Emily would be back. By then the conversation had become casual, myself putting down my phone or book whenever she came in. I was an old dog at the shelter, having just enough strength for a wag of the tail whenever my favorite person returned to pat me on the head.
But then Emily was gone. And over the course of the thirty-four days that I was in Room 1698 she would never be my nurse again. The chemo laid me low and the total body irradiation hollowed me out. Then the transplant came, muted celebrations were had, and after weeks of terribleness, I began my crawl back to health.
Every day I waited to see if I would wake up and see “Emily” written on the whiteboard, but she was always off attending to some other patient, in some other room, and I resigned to the idea that perhaps she had been a small spot of grace in an otherwise fraught journey—and I should be thankful, as I had not had many of those.
Then one day she popped her head in to say hi. She was not my nurse but she had not forgotten me. It was a short hello, just a check-in post transplant to see how I was doing. And I was doing well—better at that moment.
I sifted through the tea leaves. I had met a number of nurses who I had become friendly with, these angels in scrubs being the difference between hell on earth and tolerable misery—but I couldn’t deny that feral itching in my chest, that maybe there was something there. They were rumblings I had pushed down because I knew I shouldn’t be thinking such things, that I had enough on my plate and a life ahead of me far beyond these hospital walls and this city and this state, and jesus, she’s just being polite.
But then a crushing realization laid the whims of fantasy low, the reality forming as my delusions of grandeur ran aground at square one. I had overlooked the truth by believing that an old me still existed. All the boxes could be checked, but at the end of the day, who would want to get involved with a cancer patient?
So I let it go. We talked about bands we liked and the tv shows we were watching and our mutual affinity for donuts—and unfortunately we liked all of the same things.
My day of discharge arrived. Emily had disappeared again and my bags were packed. She had slid from the forefront of my mind, the twinge of strength that had come with the slow proliferation of healthy blood cells allowing me to set my sights on the comforts of home and a home cooked meal.
I had been detached from my IV pole, a feeling as close to getting out of prison as I hope to ever have. There, with my metaphorical arms raised to do my best Shawshank Redemption, life decided to smile once more and give me a parting gift.
The door opened and Emily peaked her head in. “Hi, I heard you were leaving today.” I confirmed the news and she congratulated me. I was getting out in record time, with good labs and few complications—so she gave me small reassurance to be cautiously optimistic.
As she was saying all of this, I ran through pages of internal monologue in milliseconds, lines and lines of dialogue and back-and-forth that could be crossed out and boiled down to the famed rebuttal that all cancer folk carry: What do you have to lose?
So I asked her if she would want to exchange numbers.
The truth is that I didn’t think there would be any romantic runway ahead of us if she did say yes. The real truth was that I had almost no one to talk about cancer stuff with. In the best-case scenario I had made a friend, a nurse who might entertain some banter and then disappear into the life of a twenty-something young woman who had recently moved to Chicago, the greatest city, as her life ever expanded and mine tried to regain focus.
To my surprise, she said sure.
Back at my parent’s house, the world of the hospital faded from my mind. I was just happy to be home. But one day I got a call from the hospital. I expected to hear the robo-voice confirming my weekly appointment. Instead it was Emily’s.
She had been assigned the routine duty to call discharged transplant patients and check to make sure they were doing well. I pulled myself up from a nauseous slump and focused. The problem was that I was doing relatively well—besides the usual detractors, I had nothing to report—which would make for a short phone call.
I had to stall for time. But how..? She then asked the god-sent, pro forma question, “Is there any way we could have made your hospital stay better?” And I was struck with inspiration, a moment of divine intervention in the form of an idea. And that idea was IV Roomba.
I proceeded to tell her how my brilliant idea of IV Roomba would have been quite helpful during my stay. I explained that as the name suggests, IV Roomba is an IV pole on top and a Roomba-esque self-vacuuming robot on the bottom. While this contraption wouldn’t vacuum, IV Roomba was essentially a hands-free IV pole that would follow you around, promising increased mobility and a renewed sense of semi-freedom for hospital patients everywhere. We have the technology—it’s time to set our patients free.
My exuberant pitch was met with a polite, “Um, yeah that sounds like a good idea.” It was a soft pass, a gentle reminder that I was a name on a list and she had actual work to do—her being a member of the regular masses who didn’t have the luxury of melting into a couch and wasting hours in cancer purgatory dreaming up C-list Shark Tank ideas (I actually still think it’s a great idea and would like 10% if someone steals this).
“Ok, well I’m glad you’re doing well.” And then she said goodbye and hung up.
Emily’s number sat untouched in my phone for a few more months. I was too busy regaining enough strength to make it across one hundred square feet without collapsing in a cold sweat. There was nausea and sleeplessness and the rashes and the thirty odd pills to be managed on the hour every hour. But she never quite left my mind.
And then one night, somewhere between three and four in the morning, after I had exhausted every attempt to sleep and had run through the reels of my life twice over, I decided to try a slice of the present. So I texted Emily a hail mary:
Hey, have you thought any more about IV Roomba?
I’ll let the text message experts decode and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of my initial missive, but I can offer the results—it worked.
The next day, Emily laughed it off and thus began a banter. They were back and forths that shrank in time in-between—from a couple days to once a day. We expanded on interests and tossed off recommendations, a twenty-first century love story decoded through bingable television shows, streamable albums, and of course—food recommendations that I had to try in the city when I was healthy enough.
My strength was returning. Not just to my legs, but to my still beating heart. The vignette that had darkened the corners of my future was softening, the sepia tones slowly flirting with full color. I was allowing myself to wonder and hope. For a life put on hold, what Emily could never know, or only one impossible day might know—was that she had healed me in ways no prescription or procedure could.
The slow trickle of hope and possibility supercharged my return to health. For once I welcomed the steroid-like hit of tachycardia, this time caused by the buzz of my phone in my pocket, the idea that someone, somewhere thought this bald bag of bones and brewing blood might be worth something.
It further underlined the thought that everyone had been hoping, a dare against the universe as those numbers crept up, adding weight to the makeshift prayer that I had been mumbling to myself through all of those long nights—that maybe I would have another shot at this thing called life.
It was a hot, late-summer day when my dad dropped me off at the train station. He had graciously come home over his lunch break to see his recovering adult son off on his big adventure down to the big city. There he would meet a girl named Emily, now long removed from the hospital, a friendship and maybe something more blooming where care and cancer had been left behind.
I took the train down into the city and listened to one of the playlists we had been sending back and forth. I let the music beat back the low boil of anxiety as I hurtled away from my bubble-like existence. I was cosplaying as a normal person, putting on the performance of my life— acting as if I was myself again.
On the corner of Ohio and Wabash, I saw Emily out of her scrubs for the first time and it may as well have been the first time I saw a woman. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, I thought I was witnessing a miracle (I don’t know if this is Biblically accurate). Sweating and trembling, the journey already arduous as I swam far from the shores of comfortability—it was all forgotten in an instant when she said hello.
The story goes on. There are good times and there are bad ones. There is more cancer and there is rebellious love in the face of it—and then there’s even more cancer and a wedding in the wake of that.
But this is enough for now. Because this is how my life began again and this is how I met Emily. As I write this she is finishing up a conference for nurse practitioners in hematology, her ascending the ranks and continuing to try and save the lives of more people like me.
There is also a certain weight to the telling— it is a story with a happy ending and a photo finish that eludes so many like me. I am fortunate to have found a searing silver lining in my illness and want to acknowledge that cancer does not always afford such serendipity.
The disease will always be a shared language between us, a painful tie that binds, but a set of words and feelings that can be shared and understood wordlessly during the best of times and the worst of them.
But we will end in the then-newly opened Eataly in River North, the two of us smiling at each other as we dance around pleasantries and debate whether to order an appetizer. We know so little about each other, or where life would take us, or how hard and wonderful it would all be.
But it felt right. And sometimes you just have to trust a good feeling when life gives you one. Because you never know where it will take you.
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
When cancer yoinked me out of LA and back to Chicago to live with my parents, I felt both cosmically unmoored and safely back where I had started. I felt like I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but there but also so far from where I thought I should have been.
I don’t remember how I found this Angus and Julia Stone song, but it became a balm as I found new understanding and meaning in what home was— and how looking for a place to belong could be a person, place, or some other, unplaceable thing that just felt right. The chorus became a repeated mantra as I lay sick in my parents’ guest bed— I would get home, wherever that was, somehow, some way.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed what you read, please Like, Comment, or Share— it helps boost visibility of the newsletter and is a nice acknowledgement from the void. But most of all, I would love to hear from whoever is reading.
Wow. From one leukemia survivor to another... thank you for this incredible story. Stoked to have stumbled across you (found you on Reddit!) and to see a fellow survivor making something of this awesome thing called life :D
What a beautiful love story, Elliott! You and your wife are lucky to have found each other. Thank you for sharing!