My new neighbor was from Algeria. His name was Yehya, and he was undergoing treatment for lymphoma. He had a distended belly, lymph nodes like overripe plums bulging from his neck, and the skinniest legs I'd ever seen. We quickly became pals, chatting away in a patois of French and Arabic about our fatherlands and faith and how lucky we were to have gotten sick in America, where we had access to this kind of medical care. It was Ramadan and his wife came to the hospital each night, carrying a giant Tupperware filled with iftar—the meal Muslims eat at sundown to break fast—but he rarely took more than a bite.
One day, the doctors moved Yehya to a private room, a few doors down, with a window overlooking Central Park. He wept with gratitude and dropped to his knees to pray, but accidentally fell and hit his head on the linoleum floor. "What happened?" the nurses shouted when they heard the crash, rushing in and ordering a CT scan of his brain. Later, Yehya confessed to me that he had lied to the nurses and told them he tripped. "I didn't want to seem like some kind of Muslim nut," he told me. Illness complicated everything, even—maybe, especially—prayer.
***
It had been roughly a week since I'd entered the hospital and started chemotherapy. I was feeling relatively fine, even spritely in comparison with the other patients on my floor, many of whom were bedridden or needed wheelchairs to get around. While it would be a stretch to say I was enjoying my hospital stay, I wasn't miserable, either. When I wasn't hanging out with the other inhabitants of the ward, Will and I played countless games of Scrabble. My parents visited me every day, spoiling me with little gifts and home-cooked dishes. And as word of my diagnosis got out, friends trickled in as well, bearing bouquets of flowers. I felt suspended—for the first time in my life, no one expected anything of me. I had the liberty to pass the time as I wanted. I wrote in my journal and signed up for an arts and crafts class. A hospital volunteer was teaching me how to knit and I was making a scarf that I planned to give to Will.
Naïvely, maybe even a little arrogantly, I began to think I'd been spared the more treacherous side effects of the chemo. Other than the usual fatigue and the mouth sores, I felt no different. Each morning, I examined my scalp in the mirror for signs that my hair was beginning to fall out, but it was thick and shiny, firmly rooted in its follicles. I thought I might be among the tiny percentage of patients who don't lose their hair during chemo and I regretted what now seemed like a hasty decision to chop it short. I even began to entertain the fantasy of moving into an apartment with Will once I was discharged. Maybe, come end of summer, I might be well enough to start working again.
Naïveté has a shelf life, however, and mine didn't last long.
About ten days in, I was moved into a private room—"isolation" the doctors called it—and forbidden from stepping outside under any circumstances. I hadn't known this was coming. I was shocked and a little pissed at the strict rules that accompanied my new digs but also relieved not to have a roommate. Anyone who entered my room, which I dubbed "the Bubble," had to wear the mandatory protective armor—face mask, gloves, surgical gown. My blood counts were being decimated by the chemo, my hemoglobin and platelets plummeting to dangerously low levels. Test results showed that I possessed nearly no white blood cells—zero the doctor on call said, cupping his hands into an O for emphasis. Soon I would be done with the chemo infusions, and over the next week, my marrow, hopefully now rid of leukemia, would start to recover and my blood cells would slowly build back up. Once I no longer needed transfusions to maintain my red blood cell and platelet counts, I would be discharged from the hospital and allowed to return home. But until then, my immune system was nonexistent and the doctor warned that a stray germ or sneeze could do me in.
Around the same time, the side effects of the chemo began to make themselves known. The lining of my throat began sloughing off, an excruciating side effect of the chemo called mucositis, which made it impossible to eat or drink or talk at anything louder than a whisper. "Are you ready to party?" Younique joked the first time she hooked me up to an intravenous morphine drip. Blessed be the excellent nurses with excellent senses of humor: They make everything better. But even with the morphine, the pain was too intense to swallow much of anything. In addition to the needle marks and bruises that now covered my arms, a spray of tiny purple dots the size of pinpricks appeared all over my chest and neck. Without platelets, the component of the blood that helps the body form clots, the capillaries closest to my skin had broken open, leaking blood to the surface. I avoided looking at myself in the mirror.
And then it finally happened: One morning, I woke up and discovered a mess of stray hairs on my pillow. By lunchtime, it was falling out in clumps, leaving pale patches all over my scalp. I ran my fingers compulsively over my skull, placing handfuls of my hair into little nest-like piles on the bedside table. Losing my hair was confirmation of what I knew but hadn't been able to fully accept yet and I spent the rest of the afternoon fighting back tears. That evening, Will helped me tug the rest out with his hands; it was like pulling weeds from damp soil. By bedtime, I was completely bald.
***
It had been more than four weeks since I'd entered the hospital, and I was waiting for my blood counts to recover from the chemo, but to my dismay they were showing no improvement. The doctors reassured me that there was no need to worry—at least, not yet—but of course, I did anyway. In the meantime, my body had become entirely reliant on transfusions. The blood of strangers coursed through my veins, bag after bag, day after day. Sometimes I tried to imagine who these donors were—a schoolteacher, a famous actor, a tarot card reader? I couldn't quite conjure them, but they were keeping me alive.
Being poked and palpated and locked in a room for days on end without a release date was maddening. The windows didn't open. The fluorescent bulbs scalded my eyes. My stomach hurt, my head hurt, my limbs hurt, everything hurt, even breathing. Each time I was stabbed with a needle or given a sponge bath, I wanted to hurl my IV pole at the wall. When I lost enough weight that I could slip off my electronic hospital bracelet, I began to fantasize about escaping. Central Park taunted me from my window. During a rainstorm, I felt a visceral longing to go outside and stand in the downpour—even if just for a minute. Finally, on a day when my pain had fleetingly retreated to a tolerable level, I hid my electronic bracelet under my pillow and when the nurses weren't looking, I ducked into the hallway and slipped into the elevator with my IV pole. I made it as far as the cafeteria on the ground floor. Then I froze. It was lunchtime, and people swarmed around me, brushing and bumping me. My anxiety mounted as I thought of all the germs in the air. I was having trouble breathing. What if I fell? What if I fainted? A few minutes later, I was back in my room. Beep, beep, my IV chirped. Strangely, I felt safe again.
If anyone could understand what I was living, it was the other patients, but I wasn't allowed to interact with them anymore, as the germ risk was too high. I missed their camaraderie and I tried to keep tabs on their progress through games of telephone facilitated by the nurses. Estelle had been discharged, and she was recuperating back home in Staten Island. Dennis's latest scans had lit up like the Milky Way, a constellation of new tumors in his lungs. He, too, would eventually need a bone marrow transplant. As for Yehya, he still walked by my room in the afternoons and, if no one was looking, he'd crack open the door, flash me a thumbs-up, and tell me Allah had my back.
I was still allowed visitors from the outside, but even that had become complicated. The people I'd played beer pong with in college had not reached out, and even though I was not surprised, I felt wounded by their silence. Instead, I tried to focus on those who did show up—my friend Mara, who came to see me nearly every day, and a cohort of old childhood pals, classmates, and colleagues, who stopped by with gifts. In the days after my diagnosis I'd welcomed their company, even craved it. But over time, I grew allergic to the looks of pity and the positivity pushers who tried to cheer me up with their get-well cards and their exhausting refrains of "stay strong" and "keep fighting." I began to feel angry at people's trivial complaints about a stressful day at the office or a broken toe that meant they couldn't go to the gym for a couple of weeks, and it was hard not to feel left out when my friends told me about a concert or a party they'd been to together.
Worse were the disaster tourists: those whom I didn't know well but who came out of the woodwork, showing up unannounced at my hospital room door with an overzealous desire to help or to bear witness to the medical carnival that my life had become. They would gape at my bald head, all misty-eyed, and I'd find myself having to console them. Or they'd bombard me with unsolicited medical advice, telling me about a great doctor they knew or a friend of a friend who'd cured their own cancer with things like essential oils, apricot kernels, coffee enemas, or a juice cleanse. I knew that most meant well and were doing the best they knew how, so I smiled and nodded, but I was silently fuming. As I got sicker, fewer and fewer came—and when they did, I began pretending to be asleep.
I wasn't entirely alone, despite my attempts to retreat from the world. Dr. Holland came to visit me nearly every day during his lunch break. He was gracious toward the nurses and the hospital staffers. Unlike some of the other attendings, who could be brusque and condescending, his bedside manner was unhurried and he always treated me with dignity, careful to make me feel like a person first and a patient second. After he was done examining me, he would sit in the recliner next to my bed, and we'd chat about everything from politics to art history and our favorite books.
Will, who was still unemployed, virtually lived in my hospital room, sleeping next to me every night on a too-short visitor's cot. My parents took the day shift, taking turns sitting by my bed and plying me with all of my favorite snacks in an attempt to get me to eat. Since entering the hospital, I had shrunk from a healthy size six to a double zero—the same size I'd been in the sixth grade—but I was often in too much pain to swallow, let alone choke down a forkful of mushroom risotto.