The Club

This is from fall 2004.

Like most clubs, this group meets regularly, in the same place, on the same day every week. Our meeting room is attractive, with comfortable seating, and refreshments are served. Although membership is limited to a small segment of the population, the club is growing. Some members of the group drive a long way to be here. Sometimes the room is full and some of us have to wait to get a seat.

But none of us really wanted to join this club.

This is my “Chemo Club,” as I have come to think of it – the group of people who come to the cancer clinic to receive their chemotherapy treatments on the same day that I do. In a small room lined with leather recliners we sit together while chemicals drip from an IV pole into our arms or our chests, filling our bodies with poisons intended to kill our cancer before our cancer kills us. Depending on the type of chemotherapy we are receiving, this can take several hours, or even all day, so we have plenty of time to get to know each other. While we talk, the nurse comes in and out, checking on us, hanging a new bag of medication on our pole when one bag is empty, asking if we want a blanket, or something from the snack tray.

Occasionally a new face appears in the group. We get acquainted with new club members like convicts greeting the new prisoner, comparing crimes and sentences:

“So, what are you in for?”

“Breast, stage three.You?”

“Lung. Stage four.”

“Ooh. How long have you been in chemotherapy?”

“Three months. I’ll be in for a year.”

Some of us have been given a life sentence – those with fourth stage cancers, metastasized beyond their original sites and now considered incurable, have been told they will need this  treatment indefinitely.

I have never liked hospitals and doctors' offices. I never wanted to be around “sick people”. But the emotional atmosphere of the Chemo Club has been a surprise to me. The room is filled with greetings, jokes and laughter, stories and sympathy. I have been touched to see loving spouses who come every week to support their partners, or grown children who stay to help a ailing parent. People swap stories about their side effects and offer advice to others similarly afflicted. There is a general feeling of goodwill and comradery. When a patient’s last IV bag is empty, the nurse removes the line and the patient stands to go.  As the patients leave, they pause at the door and say, “Goodbye, and good luck to you all this week.”

Most of the people in my life are much like me – mothers with young children, middle-class, college educated. My Chemo Club meetings present me with a more diverse group. There is a elderly farmer in suspenders, a middle-aged woman who works in a factory, a high-school student with testicular cancer.

One woman, with stage four ovarian cancer, tells me that she has full custody of her two young grandchildren. The chemotherapy is making her very sick and uncomfortable, but she has to fight, she says, for them. They need their grandmother.

Sometimes one of the group doesn't come, and we worry. We don’t ask the doctor or his nurses for information; we know they can’t tell us. Almost always, the person returns the next week, feeling fine, having taken a week off to travel, or because of illness. But sometimes, one of the group is missing, and another has sad news to report. She has seen the obituary of our absent club member. He won’t be coming back.

Being diagnosed and treated for cancer has made me aware of something I should have known all along: I am going to die someday. We are all – everyone on earth, not just the members of the Chemo Club – terminally ill, and the disease is being alive. Every day on earth is another day of an extended trip, the length of which we can guess at but don’t really know.

And that is what the members of the Chemo Club have in common, despite our diverse backgrounds. We have all faced the reality that we might not live as long as we had hoped. We have all realized that there is magic in each additional day. We are all willing to accept pain, and inconvenience, and nausea, to prolong our lives – but not because we are afraid of dying. I don’t believe that’s why we come.We come every week because now, more than ever, we enjoy life, and we want more of it.

I did not want to join the Chemo Club. I was hoping my application would not be approved. But like many other experiences I didn't want to have, this one has enriched my life. And when my term of membership is up, I expect to have mixed feelings about it being over. At my last meeting, I think I will hand out treats, and hugs, and maybe shed a tear or two. And then I will stand in the doorway, pause, and say, “Goodbye, and good luck to you all this week.”