Roger’s Reality: Dancing with the Devil, Part 5

The long march

By Roger Owens

Much is written about the vagaries of war, the battles, the heroism, but I have chosen today to focus on some of the more mundane realities of war. Mainly, the constant marching, the privation, the drudgery. Earnest Taylor Pyle was maybe the most widely-known war correspondent in the modern era, and a perusal of his columns, such as “Digging and Grousing,” reveals some of that odious, behind-the-scenes labor without which wars could not be fought. (I know; we can only wish it were so odious that wars were not fought, but there you have it.) “Digging out here in the soft desert sands was like paradise…the ditch went forward like a prairie fire…a plain old ditch can be dearer to you than any possession on Earth.” (E. Pyle, 1943)
    The war with cancer is often the same. Cindy and I have been through most of the upset of being “recruited,” realizing we are in fact in a war, and coming up with a battle plan. Now we are marching. Digging ditches every night, just to get some sleep. It is in the history books that the Romans could build an entire, palisaded encampment, complete with an outer ditch filled with water or sharpened stakes, in a single night, sleep there, and abandon it the next day. It was the only way to protect themselves against the “barbarians,” who, oddly enough, were not happy being subjugated. We live much the same way. Waking up to a new day was once all one could ask for. Now it is sometimes seen as a loss; what better escape than sleep? Any soldier will tell you, there is no better release. Every day has its miles to be marched, its ditches to be dug, its indignities to be suffered. When Cindy began losing her hair from the chemo, she had it bobbed at the beauty shop. When even that started coming out, she had me shave her head, rather than looking patchy and having it go down the drain. She calls that a life-changer; she had worried herself sick about it, ordered really nice scarves from the internet, friends had made her caps, one friend who had lost his wife gave her several fancy ball caps that used to belong to her. Cindy hasn’t worn them once. Having faced that fear, she will not, she says, be worrying about losing her hair ever again.

Many stories of war tell of the friendships that develop between soldiers of common cause, and some even between soldiers on opposite sides. Shared experience is one of the strongest bonds humans can form; in some cases, as in war, to the exclusion of any who do not share it. As we march in the war with cancer, we recognize fellow combatants. We acknowledge the injuries and the pain of others in the fight. We mourn the loss of those killed in action, even people we did not know. They died in the same war. We honor them. We remember them. We do our best to comfort the bereaved. We keep marching.

Then there is the “grousing” part. Some folks may not be familiar with the term. It means “bitching.” Everybody does it. Some more, some less, and a few, none at all. Cindy is a trooper; she even has the haircut. She makes fun and tells jokes whenever she can, whenever she is up to it, and that is most of the time. The elderly black man at the Hematology center, who took off his cap before she lost her hair, rubbed his bald pate and said, “This is what you are going to look like.” She replied, “I’m going to turn into a black man? My husband won’t be pleased....” He didn’t stop laughing the rest of the time he was there. One of the contributors on the blog described his nether regions after chemo as looking like “a well-hung ten-year-old.” Cindy said, “Do tell! How well-hung?” I meant to put that in the last column but forgot – so there it is.
    Most of the grousing involves the timing, the waiting, the appointments unkept by the doctors. What my dad described, as he was dying of lymphoma, as “the biggest pain in the ass” about having cancer: always being on someone else’s schedule. He also said once that he had been feeling sorry for himself, thinking, “Why me?” Then, he thought, just like the engineer he was, “Why not me?” He had lived the life expectancy of a man his age, in his time, and he knew it. He knew the odds – hell, he was a rocket scientist. I used to give him a hard time about playing the lottery because he knew the odds. He’d tell me to mind my own – it was five or ten bucks at a time he complained he needed expenses to write off because he had retired and was still making so much money. Like clockwork I now get my tickets (and my weekly dose of rejection, just to keep me grounded).
    But again, most of the grousing is about the timing, the waiting, all the myriad details necessary to accomplish the mission: beat the cancer. Win. Beat it. Kill it. No cross-the-line sympathy here; there are no Germans over there celebrating Christmas too. We want it dead, dead, dead. There is no quarter asked, and none given. Either you kill it, or it kills you. There will be no treaties signed, no future with a new ally in the world order. It is victory, or death.

So, we march. Day after day. We are like a different band of brothers and sisters, instinctively gravitating to those we recognize as fellow combatants on this long journey. Some folks, you wouldn’t know they were sick by looking at them. The hollow eyes of the others, surrounded by permanent bruises, testify to the many who will never come back from this war. All gave some; some gave all. These are in the latter category. And beside them, if they are lucky, they have a loved one whose eyes are nearly as haunted as their own.
    Then there are those with no one. Once you are in the war, you realize that it is everywhere. No one you talk to has not been affected. Every single person will tell you: me, my mother, my father, sister, brother, child – it never ends. And some people do it alone. A neighbor we have known for nearly 30 years told us she had gone through breast cancer and described it as “the loneliest time of my life.” We didn’t even know. Her husband sat right there and said he was scared, didn’t know what to do. Said he didn’t support her and has paid for it every day since – thirteen years. Can’t say he doesn’t deserve it. I cannot imagine.
    Cindy and I have been marching a long time. Not just with the cancer; we have braved the world together and are old compadres on this road. I am lucky enough to be able to be here with her whenever she needs me. I cannot imagine either a patient or a caregiver having to spend ten hours a day at a regular job and still try to do this job, this war, this fight. Yet there are millions who do. Bless them, each and every one. They are sick. They are hurt, in body and soul. They are tired, and they are hungry, yet they march.

Copyright © 2018 by Roger Owens