By Deborah Burand
On the day of my mother’s first chemotherapy treatment, the family crowds into a small, private room at the cancer center in our central Indiana hometown. My mother sits in the middle of the room enthroned on a vinylcovered lounge chair that, aside from the hanging bags of dripping drugs, looks like the seatmate to my father’s favorite TV chair. Nurses advise us to keep a close eye on my mother so we can alert them if my mother has an allergic reaction to the chemotherapy.
My father, brother, and I, encircle my mother’s chair as the room grows hot. Is she looking flushed, someone asks.
“Aren’t we all?” I reply as I tug at the collar of my shirt, which inexplicably seems to be tightening around my neck.
The clock on the wall ticks loudly as if trying to compensate for the silence of my unusually quiet family. Every few minutes one of us asks my mother how she is feeling. “Just fine,” she answers, smiling. Then we all shift position — crossing ankles, stretching arms, and rocking back on the legs of chairs that we pulled into the small, airless room.
Chemo treatments, it turns out, can be boring. My brother starts a crossword puzzle. When he leaves the room to call his wife, I snatch up the puzzle and finish it. I then make a mental note to bring my back copies of the “New Yorker” and “The Economist” to future treatment sessions.
A woman wearing a headscarf shuffles by our room. She is wheeling an IV tree down the hall. A dangling tube stretches from the bag that hangs on the top branch of the metal tree to the woman’s arm. As we watch the woman’s slow progress, my mother says, “People work hard to live, don’t they?”
I am tempted to respond by saying, “Don’t settle for this sad place. Let’s go find more knowledgeable doctors and more effective treatments. Don’t count on miracles to happen here.” But I keep quiet. This is not the time or the place to start arguing again with my mother about her medical choices. I’ve already lost that battle.
Around noon a nurse brings a tray of food into the room for my mother. Nearly everything on the plate is white – white bread, mashed potatoes, baked chicken and vanilla pudding. The only color is the bright orange of carrot rounds. When I comment on how uniformly white the food is, my mother responds quickly, saying, “I like white food.” Mashed potatoes dribble down her top but she doesn’t notice.
Later I read in one of those “what to expect when you have chemo” brochures that bland food is best for patients undergoing chemotherapy. But that is not the point of my mother’s newly professed appetite for white food. Rather, she is warning me in “mother-speak.” She’s cautioning me to muzzle any criticisms that I might be tempted to lob at this place, no matter how veiled those reproaches might be. Neither my father nor my brother seem to notice the undercurrent in the room. My mother and I are sniping at a sound frequency that’s lost to male ears.
Pull yourself together, I tell myself. This is her life and her cancer, not yours. You need to back off. Let her call the shots even if you think she’s making a serious, even terminal, mistake.
Suddenly one of the largest German Shepherds I have ever seen bounds into the center of the room. Tethered to a middle-aged woman, the dog circles, sniffs crotches, and then settles down on the linoleum floor with a loud harrumph and flurry of dog hair. As my family moves our collective feet to make room for this large animal, the woman tells us that the dog’s name is Bear. Bear, she explains, is seven years old. He is one of the cancer center’s therapy dogs and visits the center every Thursday.
I start sneezing as a cloud of fur tickles my nose. I try to stem my sneezing fit by breathing through my mouth, but soon my tongue begins to feel so coated with dog hair that a comb seems in order.
The woman ignores my escalating snorts and sniffles as she brightly extolls the wonders of the animal at our feet. Bear, she says, is unusually sensitive to the emotional state of patients and their families. He can tell who needs comforting.
I stare at the dog who has now turned his back on us. His eyes are locked on the exit sign in the hall. It looks like Bear has decided that we’re all just hunky dory. No need of comfort here.
My mother, ever the hostess, asks the woman about the training that therapy dogs receive. My father thanks the woman for her service. I, on the other hand, am preoccupied with trying to find a place where I can put my feet without stepping on the plumed tail that seems to be expanding like one of those hairy chia pets marketed on late night television.
After the dog and woman leave us, the room goes quiet again except for the ticking of the wall clock. Finally, my father breaks the silence. “Now wasn’t that some dog?”
“What dog?” I ask barely able to contain myself. “You call that ‘some’ dog?”
With the words “some dog” echoing in my ears, it is as if we’ve somehow fallen into the pages of my favorite childhood book, Charlotte’s Web. But in this cancer barnyard, there are no sweet spiders spinning webs that extoll the virtues of a beloved pig, rather there’s just me – channeling Templeton the Rat as if he crawled out from under Wilbur’s trough to sneer at the therapy dog. I hear myself say, “Surely you don’t mean the dog that came into the room just now and then ignored us all. If that is dog therapy….” All heads swivel toward me. The crowded room suddenly feels even hotter and I bite my lip to stop my outburst.
Looking back, I have wondered why I, an avid dog-lover, took such an instant dislike to that particular German Shepherd. One well-meaning friend suggests that perhaps the chatty woman was right that the dog was unusually sensitive to the needs of patients and their families. “Maybe,” my friend says, “the dog knew that your mother and family were not in need of comfort and that’s why he turned his back on you.” She does not convince me.
A more likely explanation as to what was vexing me about that bear of a dog and his happy handler is this: they were the safest targets in the room. Better to complain about an indifferent therapy dog than to give voice to mounting fears over my mother’s choice of oncologists and medical treatments. Perhaps Bear was giving me exactly the dog therapy that I needed. Some dog, indeed.