The saline flush is slowly dripping through the plastic tube and into my veins. Pam, the head nurse, has just finished administering the last drug in my ABVD chemotherapy treatment, the DTIC-Dome. The drugs have left me feeling weary, with a heavy head and outraged, tumultuous stomach. I'm having a hard time staying awake. My head keeps falling forward, and I keep snapping back, blinking quickly, to complete consciousness. I do not want to fall asleep here. I'm afraid that if I move too suddenly in my sleep, I'll accidentally tear the needle out of my arm and splash my blood on their cool white tile. This has only happened to me once, but once was enough.
There is one other patient in the sterile, fluorescent-lit chemotherapy room. He is, most likely, in his mid-sixties. Like me, he's sitting in one of the blue Barcaloungers, watching his own bag of saline empty into his body. We receive the same drug regimen, and they started us at around the same time today.
He is hooked up to an oxygen tank that is delivering air too fast, causing him to burp sporadically, which, in turn, encourages my own nausea. He has peeling radiation burns on his neck and the bottom part of his face. His wife — old, overweight, bad perm, denim jacket — is sitting next to him. They're keeping their own counsel, and in the course of their conversation, he periodically says things like, "I used to like living there, until those dykes moved in across the street."
ESPN is on the television. No one watches it. I'm struggling to remain conscious, and he's looking at his wife through thick, ugly glasses that came, undoubtedly, from the $19.99 rack at the Wal-Mart optical center. "They ought to throw that lying pervert out of the White House once and for all," he says, punctuating his sentence with a belch. His Green Bay Packers hat does not conceal the fact that what is left of his hair is sparse and wispy. My own hair has thinned, but has not fallen out completely. I've vowed to shave my head if it gets any thinner. Feeling like shit doesn't mean you have to look like shit. Or be a shit.
He has stopped talking. Good. Something on television appeals to him at this moment. I open my eyes, see that he's watching a golf tournament, and then close them again. Is it the Master's already? Has it really been that long since I found the lump in my neck and had to drop out of school? Time flies.
"There's that Nigger Woods," he says in a voice thick with an Upper Michigan accent and hoarse from radiation-induced irritation.
At this, I open my eyes again. There's a limit to how much I'm willing to take; eventually you have to take a stand, even when you can't force yourself out of your blue Barcalounger. I lean forward, exhausted and weak but ready to tear into the fascist cretin. I have my liberalism, my compassion, and my intelligence working for me. And what does he have? An eighth-grade education and a lifetime in the mines, if he's lucky. I would win this argument. I understand things. I am better than this.
But before I can even open my mouth to respond, he turns to his wife, eyes large behind those horrible glasses. "I hope I live," he says. "I'd like to learn how to play golf too."
His wife smiles at him, sadly, and puts her hand on top of his. He grips it with his thumb and two of his fingers, looking at her for a moment before looking back at the television. I lean back in my chair and close my eyes, wordless.