Friday, March 31, 2017

A Party in the Midwest Chemo Room

There are some things you may not know and hopefully never will.  One of them is a party in the Chemo Room and that happens when someone graduates from the program.  Happiness bounces around that room like sunbeams on a Slinky; it's everywhere.  I have never experienced anything like it and it was indirect since I did not know the people but it's huge encouragement since Yevette's day will come too.

On graduation, the patient may be in remission and won't be back for years, if ever.  We know the other paths such situations may take but there's no reason to consider such altrnative paths in the current circumstance.


Ordinarily the Prince handles Tactical support since I'm more wobbly than Yevette but he could not cover this one so off we went.  As you see from the top, it was a remarkable experience from the first step inside the Chemo Room.

Everything goes around down here.  Yevette owed the Prince some money and he used that to buy a concert ticket.  He couldn't see the show unless I covered him for Tactical just now so off he went.

This trip is brimming with more Socialism than you can possibly stand but it's tremendously important in getting through this.  We don't need to segue into a dissertation on Marxian Economics since sharing tells it already without getting poofy technical about it.


At first I was chasing people off due to the thinking if someone is not experienced then that person may turn this into a peanut gallery and I won't have Ithaka disrespecting Yevette in that way.  That approach was probably too strong since there are things to be learned from this and I know that because it teaches me things as we go along.

One of the things it taught me was about the graduation party in the Chemo Room since I saw the genuine joy in the nurses and I realized this moment is the payoff for them.  They may very well have brought this patient as close as possible to a cure and happiness radiates from everywhere.

Sometimes you hear about gezellig which has no corresponding word in English but it's a situation which is so good everyone knows it and nothing needs to be said.  People just look at each other and smile because they know the other person already knows the reason for it.  This is how it went at the graduation party.  Gemütlichkeit has a similar meaning in German but purists may insist it's not quite the same.

Whether it's Gezellig, Gemütlichkeit, or both doesn't matter much; it's just a pure pleasure seeing humans so genuinely happy about the welfare of another when those humans don't stand to gain a single thing from it.


Don't read this as getting Pollyanna with the situation since the parts of the circumstance which suck really suck bad.  There's no need to belabor side effects since you likely know of them already but you may not know of this graduation party.

Yevette has logged a week of this now so she's now eaten a significant chunk of the time toward her own graduation party.  One week out of eight may not sound like so much but it counts huge in this exercise.

Inch by inch ...

Mystery Lady:  it's a cinch!

I didn't forget either and I remember it was Robert Schuller who said it.  He was a kindly ol' buzzard.

Ed:  you quoting a preacher?

That I did.  Sue me (larfs).

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