A Close Encounter

This blog is usually pretty straightforward, as it’s title suggests. At the risk of being uncharacteristically schmaltzy, I offer you this brief post on an experience that was strange enough and touching enough to share.

On January 27^th I flew to Burbank, CA, and checked into the Hilton San Gabriel. The next morning I was to undergo my annual day of tests at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Care Center under the supervision of my surgeon, Dr. Sia Daneshmand. It had been just over six years since my cancer surgery.

I started my day the next morning with a light breakfast at the hotel, and reported for the first phase, labs, at 9:00am. After giving enough blood to supply Lance Armstrong and Keith Richards for a year, I proceeded to the waiting room for the imaging department, where you check in for X-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds, and/or MRI’s. When I entered the waiting room at a few minutes before ten, there were three other patients there. One was a painfully thin older man with wispy white hair and a deeply lined, pale face. Another was a woman of indeterminate age, morbidly obese, sitting on a motorized scooter with an oxygen bottle attached to the side of it. A clear tube snaked up her arm and rested in her nostrils.

But it was the third patient that grabbed my attention. She was a girl, no more than fourteen or fifteen, and seated directly across from me. I smiled at her quickly, and was met with that uniquely teenaged look between a frown and an outright sneer. Her eyes were dark and unblinking. She was dressed like a Goth: black skinny jeans, black boots, and black lipstick. She wore a black baseball cap with a single white question mark, and an oversized black t-shirt with the words “FUCK CANCER” on the front in large white block letters. I looked at her more closely and realized she had no eyebrows, and not a hair protruded from under the black cap.

Chemo.

While we had been sizing each other up, the white-haired man had left and a nurse had called the scooter lady back for her tests. We were alone. The girl looked me straight in the eyes.

“Do you have cancer?” she said, her voice surprisingly soft.

I attempted a weak smile. “I certainly hope not,” I said. “But I guess that’s what I’m here to find out.”

We looked at each other for a long few seconds.

“I don’t know if I still have cancer or not,” she volunteered. “And I guess that’s what I’m here to find out too.”

She looked so small and vulnerable, yet she sat straight up and had a look of fierce determination on her young face. A nurse with a clipboard opened the door to the lab.

“Frank Sadowski.”

I stood up quickly, and the black-clad girl stood up too. I realized then how tiny she really was, the top of her head not even reaching my shoulder level. She stepped close and put the side of her face on my chest and wrapped her arms around my waist, giving just the slightest squeeze.

Then she turned her head away and sat back down.

Stunned, I said nothing and followed the nurse into the lab.


Portland - February 10, 2014