Living with uncertainty
I’ve come here so often, an average of four days per week for a year, that my phone recognizes the Cancer Specialists Wi-Fi signal. The woman next to me, on the other side of the drywall partition, with the plum purple glasses and weathered gray hair, is sobbing. Gasps that sound like someone drowning. My phone doesn’t recognize that but I do.
Her cancer, I can tell from the fresh, pink chest port wound, is a recent discovery. Maybe hers was found like mine, a lump in the shaving mirror. I’m sure it’s nothing, nothing at all.
Earlier, in the waiting room, she’d been cracking Murphy’s law–type jokes and genuflecting to the power of the positive thinking. I’m not surprised she’s the one sobbing now. The beats of my infusion pump ring like a metronome tracking the time of her mournful music. Anything less than an over-written sentence like that preceding one just doesn’t capture the unforced melodrama of that place.
