• I remember the tall computer stands the nurses wheeled from room to room, and how every few hours they asked my husband for his name and date of birth, and I remember being glad I wasn’t responsible for such complicated things as drugs that might save his life.
• I don’t remember his three consecutive roommates as they were all loud and only a curtain away, but I do remember the annoyance of my husband, who survived in spite of their keeping the TV on 24/7.
• I remember when the first roommate moved out and I hastily solicited the head nurse to claim the now empty bed by the window, illusion of space with its view of the tops of trees he could see looking up from his pillow to the vastness of blue sky.
• I can’t remember the names of the twenty-some drugs the attending physician enumerated, standing next to my husband’s bed, late that 10th day in the hospital; she, Eastern European with a thick accent that was hard for me to understand, and we, both tired. She looking as miserable as me, hot in spite of the hospital A/C, having to go through each drug in detail, complicated five syllable names loaded with ‘x’s and ‘z’s. No one had told me I would be responsible in order for him to be released, and that later I’d have to create a spreadsheet to keep it straight.
• I remember restless nights, my heart thumping too fast, that 10th day going back twice into the dim light of Sam’s Club, the long walk on a hard, concrete floor through boxes of children’s diapers and porch furniture and plastic plants, clutching the corrected prescriptions to override the phoned-in mistakes. I remember panicking, not finding someone to help move the heavy sofa so the hospital bed could be delivered.
• I am not sure I remember the first time I had a sip of that beet and lemon ginger smoothie in the lobby of the new cancer center as I waited for my husband to complete his first, or was it the fourth, day of radiation while his younger brother, a 61-year-old CEO from Virginia, did business on his cell. I do remember it cost $7.95 and thinking irritably it must be a profit center for the hospital, and the name ZINGER and the sharp tang on my tongue, the vibrancy I felt from that drink, the coolness, a reprieve from the glare of hot summer sun. At home I sometimes try to replicate that ZINGER, unsuccessfully, even though I had written each ingredient down on a receipt.

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