A stranger in a familiar place
A trip to the hospital and feeling like a passenger in your own journey
And that’s a wrap on April! Thanks for everyone for continuing to read, dropping a comment, and sharing— it really makes the writing worth it, so thank you. You can also forward any email to anyone who might enjoy our little publication, which I’ve found to be the best way of spreading the Good Marrow. As always, I appreciate your support and hope May brings good spring tidings!
I recently went in for a routine check up at my cancer center and now that I’m on a six-month interval for visits— I had the sensation of being a faceless alum returning to a long forgotten school.
Maybe it was all the rain we’ve been getting in Los Angeles, but the lush green and clear skies and pulse of hot summer created a layer of beauty that I typically don’t associate with the journey. I fell into a gentle autopilot as I merged onto the 210 and wound out of Pasadena. It was a drive I had done in silence a number of times, the dull roar of the highway soundtracking prickling anxiety.
There is a certain madness that accompanies a long drive towards bad news. Time disappears and the world sounds different, the signposts of the journey pop in and out of existence, a surprise that I’ve traveled so far already, or maybe I’ve barely moved at all— it all creates long scars in the already well worn grooves of life… And eventually you wind up at a place you love and dread.
But this time felt different.
The hospital is busy, a small inconvenience that means something different when you’ve been a patient. A busy hospital is a sick hospital, and now on the opposing end of cancer— it’s always a bummer to see the other team appear to have the advantage. And as the crowds insinuate, cancer seems to have a growing advantage.
I park in the farthest satellite lot, tires crunching over gravel. I walk amongst construction workers and their shipping container offices, legs pumping as I walk the quarter mile to the front doors, pleased to be able to cross the distance on my own.
At the front, the valet circle is buzzing. Families help each other into wheelchairs, a balance between hope and pain, jokes and grunts, silence and confusion. The sick and their attachés arrive in every emotional state, usually rushing to get inside, but on this day enjoying the forgiving spring heat. The front doors welcome and swallow everyone, a prison and a promise of life now feeling like a chokepoint. I spent so many hours trying to get in and out of these doors as fast as possible, but now time has become more generous and it is just another place to pass through.
I go to get my blood drawn first, chuckling as I notice that they have again changed their system of name-calling. For awhile they called names, then, assuming names were mangled and things were missed, they swapped to a system of numbers, like a deli. For a while written on scraps of paper, they have since begun writing the numbers on patient wristbands. These are small, insignificant changes, but changes that I can imagine being debated, the minutiae of how a hospital works changing slowly over time, leaving us patients to ponder our place in line.
I log into the wifi network and wonder if anyone in IT has found me out yet. To get into the hospital’s network you have to enter your name and email address and for nine years I have entered whatever name pops into my mind and thatname@gmail.com. I have gone through all of the Lord of the Rings hobbits, knights of the round table, assorted fictional names that linger, or whatever goofy pseudonym pops into my head. On this day I am, for unknown reasons, Teddy Tarkoff, found at ted.tarkoff@gmail.com. I assume no one monitors this information but I can already see the montage whereby they filter out all the fictional names and match it with my visits or stays, eventually filtering down to the exact times I log into the wifi and another silly name pops up… And one day I have the hospital internet police waiting for me.
Number called, I am taken back to the friendly phlebotomists who scan my wristband as their automated machine prints tube labels. The whir of the machine prickles my anxiety, denoting how many labels are printing and how long I’ll be stuck for. I’ve hated needles since I was young, then grew to accept their visitation to my veins, then had a spike in fear, perhaps more at the larger question of why I kept having to get stuck— and now, in health yet again, I’ve made an easy peace.
I chat with the wonderfuly vampires. Some remember me, some don’t. I am a face in the masses. There is something nice about this. I am not a frequent flyer, the bartender doesn’t know my name anymore or maybe the staff has turned over and I can recast myself as someone else. I am down to two labels, just the basics, and the needle lingers for less than a minute.
I then walk past new construction and shifted departments. I round the corner and the burnt scent of Starbucks coffee roots me into time and place, making me slow an inch— just in time to hear “corner!” and watch as a patient is wheeled quickly by in a hospital bed.
My eyes linger. They are a huddled mass beneath a tangle of tubes and a pile of blankets, mummified against the otherwise cheery public all waiting for their iced americanos. I let them pass, unable to stop myself from looking for a hint of flesh— a sign that they’re alive. I was once that person, hurtling past a stack of bananas and cake pops, the world a meaningless mess of bright lights, so many friends and family watching my existence being shuttled by in the same lane as the carts full of lunch trays. I was once them and now I am me, so I offer up a small hope, like how some say a prayer when an ambulance goes by.
In this story I go to dermatology first because I have a couple of rash issues. There’s always rash issues, coming with the spring or going with the fall, my skin blooms and blossoms like a marigold. For the record, I respect all doctors, but afterwards I am able to text my wife and affirm our long running joke that I could be a dermatologist, when once again, and as always, the prescribed treatment is topical steroids. It’s always topical steroids. Always bet on topical steroids.
I then check in for my hematologist and wait. I take a moment to breathe it in (behind a mask, of course). I have mapped the position of every chair in the waiting area. I can read body language the way golf pros can diagnose swings. The slump of defeat, the leaned slouch of a frustration, the annoyance of a veteran, the poise of someone going through something impossible but very good at keeping it all together. They are all assumptions of course, and as much as I think I know anything— I know nothing at all.
The penitent or perturbed masses are a painting open for interpretation. I infer my own thoughts and feelings, maybe knowing a hint of intent or able to offer an ounce of experience, but I decide that the silence is meaningful and buoyant. That maybe if we all come here enough times, and we sit long enough, something good will happen. And amidst the quiet of strangers, I would like to tell them— yes, it can.
A nurse comes out to get me who knows me. We chat on our way back to a room, piecing together incomplete timelines of each other’s life, trying to fit seven or eight months into a few minutes as she weighs me and takes my vitals. Everyone is so busy because everyone is so sick. Small talk feels indulgent but also maybe quite necessary. We are human after all. I smile beneath my mask when a nurse tells me I look good— she’s given me a number of my baby vaccinations and I feel like a proud adult child.
I shuffle to a room behind a couple who appear to be on their first appointment. Their journey is just starting and they are being given a tour, a sense of hope in their amazement at the facilities. The facilities are nice but not amazing and I know the feeling— that we have to believe that this place can save our life. That these people know something that we don’t— and they do. And so crushed under the impossible weight of bad news, we put on the bravest face we have, nod, kick the wall, harumph and think, “yeah, this’ll do just fine.” And it can.
I first meet with my doctor’s nurse practitioner, the second one I’ve known over my time. Both wonderful people, differentiated in my mind many ways but primarily as one of them preferring to use the hand crank and the other using the motorized drill when grinding into my bones for my bone marrow biopsies. Despite being my torturer, they both have been very nice and we always manage to make up. We talk about summer plans, about her vacation, and about my rashes. Against the backdrop of cancer, we sound like two old friends catching up.
My doctor arrives and I don’t have enough words to express my gratitude towards him. But luckily he is going to Scotland. I always say he needs a vacation, and while this is for a conference, we joke about it being the same thing. He gets a kick out of me being a screenwriter and we chat movies and Hollywood and cancer feels far away. My labs look good and I am healthy, so the band begins to play me out— I gratefully have no reason to linger. And while I would love to chat, to try and get to know this man that has made it his mission to help me live longer— he has other me’s to see, other me’s at some other place in my timeline, sick or sicker, and I know his time is precious and in a way, every second we banter is a second he could spend better elsewhere. So I thank him and extend our now-patented fist bump, wish him safe travels, and then he’s gone. And I am free to go.
I linger for a moment in the hallway, feeling like an alum who has returned to wander the low ceilings of his high school, hoping maybe someone recognizes him and strikes up a conversation. And some nurses do, they ask if my wife has finished grad school and we joke about how their is now a “Hotel + Bar” on the hospital campus. They say the food is actually really good! We make jokes about gussying up a destination cancer center but I know my parents would’ve loved to have such a luxury when I was imprisoned there. Then the tide comes in and gravity pulls me gently out the door— there is work to be done, and it no longer is me.
I am surprised to want to stay longer. In and out has always been the mission, but I begin to wonder if this will be the only time I am here this year. Six months can become seven can become eight, and then the holidays will rear their head… And suddenly the year is gone. As I retrace my steps and search for someone else to say goodbye to, I am thankful for the luxury of now feeling like a stranger here.
I go to the bathroom before I make the drive back home and see an older man who is sick and struggling to wash his hands. I want to help but some unwritten rule prevents me. I know how cancer narrows our gaze, a focus from sink to door handle requiring utmost energy, so I linger and hold the door for him. It sticks with me. I am no savior but I see the shake in his hands and it makes me clench my own.
Sunlight hits as I make the long walk back to my car. I exhale. It’s over. I am hungry and always feeling deserving of a treat after so much... Emotion. I have the cheeky idea to walk down to this new Hotel + Bar and see what these new patients have been privileged with. Maybe I’ll even have a beer. Wouldn’t that be something? Like going for a swim on the moon.
I get to the Hotel + Bar and am impressed. There is a concierge and a nice outdoor terrace to sit and look back at the hospital. It is a peaceful and sad vantage point. Nestled amidst bistro seating, you are able to gaze south at the tower that houses your loved one. It is a nicety I would want my own family to have, the chance for a little comfort and a moment to unwind. But now being on the other side of it, I feel a roil of displacement as I remember how I felt in that room up there. It is a glimpse into a side that I never had to deal with, the guilt of comfort amidst illness.
It’s enough for me to politely decline a table. As much as I want the Bar + Hotel to be a smashing success, something about the typeface of the menu reminds me of the menus they would give me in my hospital room. If I don’t have to eat at the hospital I think I will choose not to. But I hear the food is actually quite good!
I make the quarter-mile walk back to the gravel lot and clock out with the construction workers, who are dusty and soaked-through with sweat. I may be a patient but I am immersed in the grit of life, gamely sweating along with them. Maybe I can blend in and pretend I was always one of them.
I get in my car and decide to go pick up sandwiches and some tiramisu from a place Emily found— a small gift from the outside world she used to bring me when I felt up to wolfing down a stack of italian cold cuts in my hospital bed.
I drive in silence this time, trying to understand the strange sadness that sits in my empty stomach. It is melancholy, the disassociation of being forgotten by a time and place. Similar to a favorite teacher you had, how you only realize years later you would like to thank them, I wonder if this place and people will ever truly know what they do. I make a note to tell them next time. But I always do.
As I wrestle with my indecision, the guy behind the deli counter calls my number and hands over my overstuffed sandwich, and as I reach for it, he spots the hospital wristband around my wrist. I see his eyes linger on it, a small realization or understanding that I am… of a place. And of a people.
I thank him and go to pay. And as I drive back I decide to leave the wristband on until I get home.
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
“Like I Say (I runaway)”, Nilüfer Yanya
The drum machine drums, the plink of wood block, the boinging road-trip guitar riff, all building to that wall of distortion on the chorus— it’s a banger folks.
I’ve been in the habit of running to the Smashing Pumpkin’s Siamese Dream lately (“Today” hitting around the first mile is A+ motivation) and when this song dropped it immediately captured some of that same magic. Fueling my perpetual run from illness, it immediately made the loosely-symbolic playlist.
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Oh Elliot you had me in tears. I was just at my hospital for my 2 year post transplant result appointment. I experienced at those same feelings! This is a strange club we belong to. I'm so happy for your continued good health. Your writing is powerful.
Perfectly timed and so well expressed; I have my first post-chemo, post-treatment check-up tomorrow and you've described very much what I imagine/hope it will be like ... "the disassociation of being forgotten by a time and place"