Take Me Out to the Park

When I was twenty-six years old, I worked interpreting for people who used sign language as their primary mode of communication. One day, I was called in for an urgent meeting at a local hospital in the city where I lived. There, a man younger than me – a mere twenty-two –was receiving life-changing news. He had acute lymphocytic leukemia.

The doctors told him they had an 80-90% success rate treating this cancer, but the treatment would be brutal. Every day, I trekked to the cancer ward to provide communication enhancement services between doctors and patient. Every day the young man grew thinner, sicker, and more in pain. Each few weeks, the doctors rotated off the ward.

Since this young man was undergoing a bone-marrow transplant, a sterile environment was of utmost importance. Very few visitors were allowed and those of us who could enter his room did so after scrubbing and donning hospital scrubs and a mask. Not one bouquet of flowers or a single potted plant adorned his windowless room.

One day, toward the end of the fourth month, I jogged up the stairs to the leukemia ward, a few minutes late. Not looking forward to interpreting the doctors' visit with the patient – who was by this time skeletal, lobster red (an effect of graph vs. host disease), and writhing in pain – I stopped short with eyes wide and mouth open as I stared across the hall to an empty room, curtains pulled aside, bed stripped. I stood without moving for a moment then leaned against the wall. I'd known it was coming, still …

In a moment the head nurse rushed over, full of apologies. "I'm so sorry, I tried to call you. I didn't want you to see that alone. I waited for you to get here, but I was called away. I'm so sorry." We held hands briefly, and tears filled both our eyes. "I don't know how you do it," I whispered. She answered,

"It's really hard, but you get used to it." "I thought there was such a high success rate," I turned to her with a question on my face. "Maybe somewhere," she sighed, "but not here. We lose most of our patients. That's why the doctors only stay for three weeks," she replied, not mentioning at that moment how the nursing staff stayed week after week and month after month.

I made a promise to myself later that afternoon, almost three decades ago. When my time comes, I refuse to spend the last hours and days prisoner in a sterile windowless hospital room. Take me out to the park where I can touch grass and dirt, where the breeze blows pollen, and dust, and who knows what else, my way. Surround me with friends and family – who haven't scrubbed up and who touch me if they want to. Bring my pets – dogs, cats, even chickens, and maybe a stray dog or two – preferably ones with mange and fleas who need a little extra TLC. I don't want to leave this world cut off from it, but immersed in it – every messy, germy, imperfect bit of it.