The Faded Photo by Price Sarah

Author:Price, Sarah [Price, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781503938670
Publisher: Waterfall Press
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

When she walked into the chemotherapy center, she felt as if everyone was staring at her. With her short wig and thinning eyebrows, she knew that, for the first time, she actually looked like a cancer patient, and the feeling made her very self-conscious. Even though it was a wig and not a thinning or patchy head of hair, she could see that they knew. The nurses, the patients, the family members waiting for their loved ones—they all knew. To their trained eyes, it was easy to tell the difference between real hair and hair meant to hide the fact that she, too, had become part of the exclusive Cancer Club; no invitation needed to join, thank you very much. No discrimination here. Age, gender, ethnicity: none of this mattered. No one chose to join; instead, cancer chose its members. The Cancer Club might be open to all, yet it came with an exorbitant price tag attached.

Of course, they weren’t really all staring at her. It was mostly in her imagination. Still, when some looked up to see who had walked in, she felt uncomfortable. Perhaps even vulnerable, a feeling she wanted to avoid at all costs.

The Chemo Cocktail Lounge was unusually quiet for a Thursday afternoon. Frances walked past the nurses’ station and greeted Eddie. He smiled at her and held up his hand, indicating that he needed to finish something before he would take her vitals: temperature, weight, pulse, and blood pressure.

Frances took another glance around and wondered why it had been so busy her first time. This time, however, the nurses were lingering around the main administration desk, chatting away as they plucked chocolates from an almost-empty Russell Stover box.

“Good morning, Mrs. Snyder,” Eddie finally said as he motioned toward the chair. “How are you doing today?”

She had barely sat down before he popped the thermometer into her mouth and asked her to roll up her sleeve.

“Phf-ine,” she managed to mumble while attempting to keep the device held steady under her tongue. Why do they always do that? The dentists, the doctors, the nurses. Always sticking something in their patients’ mouths, then asking the same silly questions, expecting an intelligible answer. Or, perhaps, not expecting any answer at all. It was just part of the routine, she guessed.

“Good, good. That’s just what we like to hear!” He smiled at her and began pressing buttons on the blood pressure machine.

For an instant she found it amusing that “Phf-ine” was just what they liked to hear. Indeed, these people had become adept at interpreting medical grunts! A silly image crossed her mind: She visualized an austere classroom chock-full of newly recruited medical students, all wearing white medical gowns and stethoscopes, each one sitting in a chair with a thermometer stuck under their tongue. Eddie was standing in front of them, like an orchestra conductor, a huge scalpel in his right hand in place of a baton. At his prompt, they were all, in unison, repeating the same sentence, “Aheh hamm phf-ine,” over and over again.

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