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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chemotherapy is hell on Earth.
For the rest of the first week, I watched Neil go from “miserable, but kind of functioning,” to “miserable, nonfunctioning, and super crabby.” It was easy enough to put up with. He wasn’t just being a dick for no reason. I wouldn’t be a piece of cake to live with if I felt hot all the time, sick to my stomach, and too weak to walk. However, around the end of that first week, my patience had begun to fray when he would argue that the sheets hadn’t been changed when they most certainly had, or that I was stealing all the blankets when he was wrapped up in them like King Tut.
I knew he felt terrible. It showed in every line on his face, the dark hollows under his eyes. One day, after he’d nodded off in the arm chair in his study while trying to finish a sentence that hadn’t fully made sense as he’d been speaking it, I was startled to find myself thinking that he didn’t look like a man who was forty-eight. He looked like a man who was sixty-eight and dying.
“It’s the chemo,” Josh reassured me when I tearfully confronted him in the hallway. “It looks really bad, but that just means the drugs are working.”
Thank god for Josh. Tall and lanky, with sandy brown hair and a nose that was way too big for his face, Josh was the most patient nurse I had ever met in my entire life. If Neil blamed him for the sun setting at an odd angle, poor Josh would apologize for it without complaint.
By day six, Neil was sleeping almost full time, and I started to have the strangest feeling of loneliness. I stood in the kitchen one night making a cup of tea that Neil had asked for, but I knew he wouldn’t end up drinking. And I thought, “This is what it will be like when he’s dead.” Not “if he dies,” but “when he’s dead.” I’d cried all the way back upstairs.
Some of my emotional response had to do with my cycle finally getting back to normal. After the baby scare, I was charting, taking my temperature every morning and peeing on ovulation predictors. If my period was an hour late, I would know about it. I’d also managed to find a doctor in London who would give me a birth control shot when I finally did get my period again.
Not that Neil and I were going to be having tons of sex or anything. I just wanted it for my own peace of mind.
But the whole “don’t get pregnant” plan had an unexpected benefit for Neil’s care. The doctor predicted Neil might need several rounds of chemotherapy to get the cancer into remission. If I kept track of his symptoms, we would know what to expect when round two floated by.
I started taking copious notes, like how often the sheets needed changing because of his night sweats, to what food made him sick to his stomach. I did all of this surreptitiously, because any little thing seemed poised to set him off, emotionally. I imagined confronting him with what I was doing, and I could almost hear him snapping, “Don’t you start reducing me to numbers on a damn chart, too!” and decided to keep it to myself.
About ten days after the first dose of drugs, Neil started to get less prickly. He was so relieved that his hair hadn’t fallen out by the end of week two that his mood improved vastly. Week three was like paradise. He was almost himself again, albeit a more nauseated version of himself, but the anti-emetic drug Dr. Grant had prescribed took the edge off of that, somewhat. Neil ate, he got dressed, he even went for daily swims, since his usual workouts made him too tired.
His week of rest became my week of exhaustion, because when his sex drive returned, it was with a vengeance. I was the first to know when he was feeling better; he shook me awake in the night.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, rubbing my eyes. “What’s wrong?”
I leaned up to turn on the light, but he tugged me down, covering my body with his. “I need you. Right now.”
It took me a minute to process this request. What did he need? A glass of water? Another blanket? Then he rolled me beneath him, and I felt the hard ridge of his erection against my belly.
“Oh,” I said, and “okay,” and he was inside me, all of him, my unready body stretching around him painfully. I moaned, utterly grateful; I’d missed this intimacy more than I would ever admit to him.
As much as it pained me, I had to stop him with a hand to his shoulder. “Condom. You have to put on a condom.”
