Oasis of Hope

My wife’s cancer is in her abdomen, and at this point she looks as if she’s in the early stages of pregnancy. We’re going to Mexico because the chemo has failed. There’s a hospital called Oasis of Hope in Tijuana, where they try to treat cancer with diet. They’ve had success, we’re told, and some Canadian artists have put money in my wife’s bank account because they want to help with our trip.

We fly to Chicago, then board a plane to San Diego, where a bus will take us to the hospital in Tijuana. But right away things start to go wrong. We are stalled on the runway for a couple of hours because of mechanical problems. For Carole, sitting upright creates painful problems. I give her a narcotic, Percocet. Carole doesn’t like them. They wipe out pain, but the constipation is brutal. Things are not right at the best of times. This is clearly going to be the worst of times.

We exit the plane and wait in O’Hare Airport. Our new plan is to reroute to LA and take a bus to the San Diego airport. From there a taxi will take us to the hotel, and from there we’ll be picked up in the morning and taken to Tijuana. Carole asks if a taxi will be waiting at the San Diego airport, ready to take us to the hotel. I rise to the occasion. I get pushy with the airline agents and ask hard questions. There are a lot of angry and bored people waiting with us. A woman on her cell speaks to head office describing, play by play, the chaos unfolding around us. I like her. She has an edge like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Her voice is unemotional, purely descriptive, narrating each detail as it happens. I fill in the other end of the call. There are no solutions coming from head office.

What happens if things get worse? Carole is temporarily enjoying the waves of pain relief from the Percocet. I pop one myself to take the edge off. I’m more patient when I’m stoned. Anyway, there’s nothing we can do. We’re helpless and we know it.

Carole is always urging me to read more, so I go to the airport bookstore. Elmore Leonard looks promising. I buy one and go off scouting for food.

Carole is allergic to wheat and many other things, so I don’t hold out much hope. I’m worried a long wait will turn into a medical emergency. Carole needs to eat at regular intervals. She’s brought soup, spelt muffins, and a few other treats a group of friends has prepared for the trip. Everything is organic. But her store of food is not going to last and she’s getting tired from sitting and waiting. The growing tumours press against her internal organs. I watch Carole from a distance. She worries if she catches me looking at her. She says I’m thinking about her dying.

She’s an extraordinary woman, an Irish-French beauty from Quebec. She has the most delicate skin and beautiful grey-green eyes. Her beauty is somehow more visible through the chemo and all the other calamities that have befallen her, losing her hair the most humiliating side effect of the last six years, her healthy hair, brown, curly, and full. I’ve learned how to look away before crying.

I show her the fruits of my travels: a yogourt, a juice, tea, and an Elmore Leonard book along with the New Yorker. She leafs through the New Yorker. I live for bringing surprises. I used to run to the store to buy her cigarettes, Matinée Extra Milds. I wonder if that caused the cancer.

I’m a boy showing my mother insects and frogs gathered from a field. But I’m also fifty years old and in a textbook mid-life crisis. Holding Carole’s hand, I entertain myself looking at attractive women in the boarding lounge. I hope she doesn’t notice. Carole is a warm and gracious woman, but the other side of her is ferocious. Her anger can melt aluminum at a hundred paces. I’ve spent sixteen years trying to understand it, trying to get around it, to no effect; she can’t be fooled or deterred. But cancer has softened the rage, and she meditates. Now I love her anger. She’s become my holy woman, and whenever I leave her presence I begin to feel uneasy.

A loudspeaker tells us we can board for LA.