Cancer Suite

I hope your day is perfect. I hope your daily struggles are the simple ones of traffic, office gossip, kids homework, what to have for dinner and balancing the check book.

So many folks don’t have those luxuries and they wish they did.

Once again I spent a couple of hours yesterday in the waiting room of the Sloan Kettering Cancer treatment building in New York City.

I was there with my wife for her bi-annual check-up on a cancer she is fighting. But this post is not about her. It’s about what I observed in the cancer treatment waiting room.

I’d been there many times before and written about it and it’s always the same. It is filled with ill people of all ages and in all stages of illness. There were all cultures as noted by dress, all nationalities, all races, all religions and many languages spoken by those scattered around the comfortable waiting room.

Role reversals were evident. Confident men, the kind of men who are used to command and people jump. I watched them acquiesce to their wives or mothers or partner to help understand what they had to do. Drink this, wait an hour for your CT scan, the look of bewilderment apparent in the glazing eyes of many.

Some men tried to be strong, but for most cancer patients this is a new fight. There are no spreadsheets to analyze cancer. There are no executive orders one can give to make it go away.

On and off the elevators they came. Old women and men with walkers and canes. Young women with head scarves and no hair. The room was filled with very ill people and worried family and friends sitting below a clear and ominous sign: Chemotherapy Suite.

My point in all this is for us to be thankful for our day of struggles, of little irritants, of unfinished tasks or rude people.