Post Number Nine

Waiting Room Therapy

We are getting toward the end of Terry's daily radiation therapy. Taking the next treatment is a morning act of will each and every day.  Monday was especially difficult.  The doctor offered Terry a week off to let her body rest.  She turned him down.  She would rather endure the discomfort and the battle for control over her own body than opt for a rest that would push the final day of this treatment down the road another week.  I was so proud of her.  I cannot stand what is happening to her.  I cannot imagine what it is like to go through what she must now go through and what awaits her in surgery and in the chemotherapy that will follow.  If she ever decides she needs a rest I will call for it with all my might.  But this time she gritted her teeth and said, "let's continue."  Terry does not think of herself as brave.  Monday proved her wrong.

I have learned that there is a kind of waiting room therapy for cancer patients.  Complete strangers meet every morning for radiation therapy and sense the need for support and understanding.  This therapy is self administered by those who's bond is their schedule of daily treatments.  Here are people facing the most unwelcome of life experiences.  For some there is serious hope that enduring these brutal and primitive procedures will lead to complete recovery.  Others are more desperate.  They know that this is just a bargain for time.  Some are there for the first time.  They are looking at the first of 28 or 40 or 60 daily irradiation's. Others are nearing the end of this phase of their battle.  Some have companions.  Others are alone.  Spiritually and emotionally they regard one another as equals.  They speak encouraging words and offer prayers for one another.  They sincerely rejoice when one finishes their schedule.  They embrace anyone who is there for the first time.  There is no judgement in that room.  There is only love - the kind of love that is only possible when all pretense is cast aside.

In this waiting room therapy I am an intruder.  I do not share the bond of common illness and suffering.  I am once removed. Never the less, I recognize holy ground when I see it.  Waiting room therapy is holy ground indeed.

Dave Gladstone