Most of the patients in the radiation waiting room are fairly functional, they seem alert, and are actively engaged in conversations or arguments with family or friends who accompany them to treatment. Some patients spend a great deal of time expressing irritation and annoyance about the wait for their radiation or their displeasure with the way their treatment is being scheduled for or provided by their doctor. The rest of the patients sit quietly reading, or watching CNN on the TV in the corner of the waiting room.
However there is usually one patient in a wheelchair with a white blanket wrapped around them or the blanket is clutched in their hands as a security blanket. These are plain hospital issued blankets that look neither soft nor comforting, but these patients hold on to them tightly.
When you look into the faces of the patients with the white blankets, they have a blank expressionless look on their face. There is no light in their eyes, you can't make eye contact with them or engage them in conversation. Their heads are sometimes bent to the side and they do not seem to be staring outside their bodies. When someone approaches the white blanket patients and asks them questions, they do not or can not answer. If after a fair amount of prodding by the hospital staff they do respond, they usually answer the questions asked in only one or two words.
The white blanket patients have an ageless quality. Their faces are so blank that they don't have wrinkles, but they do not look young. They just seem to be floating through time and space. There do not seem to be any family members accompanying the white blanket patients; they are wheeled out of the waiting room by drivers for nursing homes or staff with uniforms from ambulance companies.
In my imagination, the white blanket patients have already left this world and all that is left is the cancer filled shell of their body brought to the radiation department for more treatment. I wonder why the white blanket patients are still being given treatment.
I do not know this person; I do not know how hard the white blanket patient is still fighting to live. Perhaps they are clutching on to life as tightly as they clutch on to the white blanket they are covered with. The blanket like their lives might not be comfortable anymore, but holding onto that blanket might be better than letting go.
Before being diagnosed with cancer I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the reality that at some point I would die. I knew on a rational level that at some point my existence would end and consciousness would cease, but some part of me could never fully comprehend or accept that reality. Part of my mind would try to convince me that somehow I was different, that I would survive, that who I was as a person would never be truly extinguished. I would have panic attacks thinking about dying and somehow distract myself so I truly never had to fully face or confront my impossible to avoid demise. Somehow I could avoid the unexpected illnesses, the brain aneurysm, the strokes or sudden heart attacks that seem to strike other people. I know it was irrational, but I just didn't think I would die.
With the diagnosis of cancer the reality of the finite existence of life has come home to roost. With a diagnosis of cancer you can no longer convince yourself that you are different, that you will come out of this life without dying. You have cancer; to have cancer means to have an illness that while it might go into remission will at some point in the future most probably end your life. (Unless an earthquake, random blizzard or traffic accident driving on the Mass Pike to get radiation treatment at Dana-Farber ends your life first.).
I do not have a belief in god or a higher power. I do not believe in an afterlife, I have no belief in anything after death but the end of existence, still I don't know where it went, but for the time being the terror has gone.
Perhaps being forced to face for the first time that I am human, I have cancer, I am breakable has made me also accept the fact that I will die. Perhaps it is sitting in the radiation waiting room seeing the white blanket patients who are in wheelchairs not moving, staring off into space, waiting for their next treatment when they seem like they have already left their body. Maybe it is the realization that there are perhaps much worse fates in life worse than death. Maybe at forty three years old it is finally time for me to grow up.
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