Photograph by Amy Hart
My mother was born in the 1920s, before the miracle of antibiotics—a time when children died from diseases that no longer raise an eyebrow. As a result, she took my sisters and me to the doctor more than strictly necessary to make sure our headaches weren’t meningitis, our muscle aches weren’t polio, and our rashes weren’t scarlet fever. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, since I did, in fact, survive into adulthood.
Oftentimes I wasn’t very sick when I went to the doctor, so afterwards we’d visit my father at his law office, which was located above Smith’s Drug Store. We’d climb the creaky stairs, and while my mom chatted with his secretary I’d twirl in his big leather chair, breathing in the smell of the oiled wood floors and the big books holding up the walls. Then the three of us would go down and sit at the lunch counter and have ice cream cones. My mother mixed it up between vanilla and strawberry; my father and I always had chocolate. It felt like we were celebrating a special holiday just for me, which more than made up for going to the doctor yet again.
Over time that childhood memory morphed into an adult ritual with a twist: If you get bad news from a doctor, you go for ice cream. Eating my cone or cup, I can retrieve for just a moment the sense of sitting on that stool with my parents, one on either side, feeling safe and happy, knowing I had escaped some unnamed, unknown danger.
In the decade since my wife Dee was diagnosed with cancer, we’ve eaten a lot of ice cream.
Dee’s cancer is both very rare and very incurable, making it frustrating but also endlessly fascinating to her many doctors. While we understand the fascination, we’re pretty much over it, ourselves. Early in the spring these doctors had run out of other options and sent us from North Carolina to the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, where Dee underwent a fancy kind of radiation twice a day for five weeks. Now it was fall, time for a whirlwind trip back for follow-up scans.
We’d been told that when we landed at BWI we should go out Door 13 and catch the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shuttle to our hotel. So we went out Door 13, and this guy drove up in a shuttle equipped with a wheelchair lift, presumably for Dee, and said, “NIH?” Easy peasy.
We were a good forty-five minutes from the airport—fifteen minutes from our hotel in Bethesda—when our driver got a phone call. He started shaking his head, then banging the steering wheel, then banging his head on the steering wheel which, by the way, you can’t do while also keeping your eyes on the road. When the call ended he started texting furiously, swerving back and forth across five lanes of traffic.
Because he had all but abandoned his driving duties, I thought maybe I should ask what the problem was. Turns out he had picked up the wrong people at the airport (namely us), and the people he was supposed to pick up were still there waiting. There wasn’t much we could do, so we just tuned out, held on, and hoped the ride would end soon. Big mistake. Suddenly we were seeing signs for BWI instead of Bethesda—he had turned around and was going back to the airport.
I started the ensuing conversation with, “Are you kidding me?!” He kept pounding the steering wheel, saying he didn’t have a choice; it was all our fault for getting into the shuttle when he said, “NIH?”
Clearly this was going to be an inconvenience, but we didn’t understand the scale of the problem until he said he might have to leave us at the airport in order to pick up his other fare. This brought me back to, “Are you kidding me?!” Dee called the shuttle company thinking that, surely, clearer heads would prevail. They hung up on her. Twice.
About that time we arrived at the airport and, sure enough, there was his other fare waiting at the curb. And sure enough, we got kicked out, wheelchair and all, and spent the next several hours getting back to Bethesda.
That was Tuesday.
On Wednesday we got the bad news—the tumors inside Dee’s spinal cord, whom we’d named Sally, Roger, Junior, and Junior, Jr., had set up housekeeping in earnest. The radiation had failed.
Because we’d lived through the same diagnosis several times over the previous ten years, it wasn’t quite as terrifying as it was once upon a time. But in that moment everything did grind to a halt—time, thought, plans for the future. What we felt more than anything was an accumulated tiredness of heart and mind and body that went all the way to the bone.
Clearly there was nothing to do but head for ice cream, so we found a shop nearby. We ordered two large sundaes, and the skinny kid behind the counter asked if we wanted whipped cream and a cherry. This was confusing. First of all, it was a sundae—was he new to the ice cream business? Second of all, did he not know that our personal planet had just stopped spinning? Of course we wanted the whipped cream and cherry. In fact, make that two cherries.
After our ice cream we wandered for a while until we came across happy hour at a place called Gringos & Mariachis that had strong drinks, good food, old brick walls covered with murals and young wait staff covered with tattoos. A few margaritas and quesadillas later, our adrenaline flagged. We staggered back to the hotel, threw ourselves down and slept like the dead.
Unfortunately we woke to the Day After Diagnosis which always has fewer perks than the Day Of. You see the long, scary road ahead without the buzz of Patrón or your Chunky Monkey sugar high, and you desperately want to opt out of what’s coming. But escape is not an option. The fact was, we had exhausted Dee’s best shot at remission, and it was time to go home.
So 48 hours after we got to Bethesda, 24 hours after we got bad news, and 12 hours after our tequila and ice cream orgy, we got back in an airport shuttle, this time with a driver named Emmanuel.
Emmanuel was from Ghana. Within the first few minutes he told us about his entire family, including his 102-year-old father whose many wives had given him a total of twenty-eight children, the last of whom was conceived when his father was eighty.
Since Emmanuel clearly missed his family, I asked what had brought him to the United States.
He said, “The Holy Spirit.”
Turns out he’d had a number of experiences where God had spoken to him. “People think God whispers when he speaks to you. Nooo, he just talks very, very fast.” Besides advising him to come to America, the Holy Spirit had blessed him with visions—one telling him to inform an infertile couple they would “most definitely” conceive (which of course they did), and one telling him to warn a neighbor in Ghana of a host of snakes in her house.
I said, “How did she not know she had a host of snakes in her house?”
He said, “They were in the closet.”
His final story was about a woman riding in the very van we were in who was possessed by a demon that made her roar like a lion. Emmanuel shouted at the demon, “What is your name?” No answer. Emmanuel shouted louder, “What is your name?”
The poor woman’s husband replied, “Her name is Mary.” Emmanuel shouted, “No, the demon’s name!” Apparently the demon didn’t feel like sharing that information. Nevertheless, after considerable effort Emmanuel was able to cast it out.
We sat in the back seat listening to this story, and I wondered briefly if he could do something about Sally, Roger, Junior, and Junior, Jr. After all, we knew their names, so that wouldn’t be a problem. In the end, though, I decided not to ask. Dee wasn’t roaring, at least not yet, and now we knew: things could be worse.
Betsy West: After 30+ years as an academic in the field of Architecture (which was both a privilege and a joy), I’ve returned to my roots to fashion a second career as a writer. I’m currently working on a memoir about the experiences my wife Dee and I have had during the twenty years since she was diagnosed with a rare and incurable spinal cord cancer which over time has confined her to a wheelchair. It’s about her experiences as a patient and mine as a caregiver and the attendant scariness and grief and frustration of all that, but also the constant absurdities (and occasional hilarities) that are part and parcel of the medical world and the many weird and wonderful people we’ve met along the way.