I was having lunch with another nurse outside the hospital when I spotted a former patient of mine.
I jumped up to hug him, and marveled that he had hair. Jeff is an English professor and we have mutual friends who teach at a nearby university. I had the good fortune of first meeting Jeff at a dinner party long before he became a patient in my hospital. The next time I had seen him was in the hospital. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma and was undergoing treatment.
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times Theresa Brown, R.N.“Hey, Theresa,” he called out, walking in the hall, holding his I.V. pole, bald, dressed in a hospital gown. “It’s Jeff.”
I could not place him, and he reminded me how we had met. I realized that the unease I felt was because I try to keep my work life separate from my “real” life. Even more, I like to believe that keeping these worlds separate helps keep cancer from affecting anyone I know.
Jeff stayed for just 19 days. While I was only his nurse for a brief time during his stay, I was often stationed near his room. We would talk, not about cancer or his transplant, but about a literature class he was preparing and some writing he’d done for a magazine. For me it was refreshing, a dip back into the life of the mind I had left behind at the university. For him I imagined it was a way to feel like a person rather than only a patient.
And then several months later, there he was, having lunch in the same restaurant where I was dining with my friend.
It happens sometimes — I see a patient out and about in the real world following treatment in the hospital. Every time they appear to me like a mythical being, someone newly human just formed out of clay.
Seeing Jeff emerge from the short flight of stairs as he arrived at the restaurant also brought to mind the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In that well-known tale, Orpheus was a musician, deeply in love with Eurydice, who died after being bitten by a snake. Heartbroken, Orpheus used his music to charm his way into the underworld and convince Hades to bring Eurydice back to life. Orpheus was warned not to look back at Eurydice until they both climbed up the steps from the Underworld, but Orpheus could not resist a glance back. Having broken the rules, he watched helplessly as she dissolved and disappeared.
I’ve always thought this was one of the crueler stories in Greek mythology. Surely the gods could have some sympathy for Orpheus’s sense of disbelief that his lost love had come back to life.
That was the feeling I had when I saw Jeff, fully solid, with hair on his head, eating out in a restaurant, looking like a professor instead of a patient. As he and I talked, I kept touching his elbow, wanting to assure myself that he was real.
I told him he looked great, which really meant that he didn’t look like a patient any more.
A couple weeks later I saw him again, in the public library. This time I didn’t need to keep touching his elbow; two sightings had convinced me he wouldn’t dissolve. We talked some about his health, but most of our conversation focused on books, his writing and teaching.
Jeff has given me permission to tell his story, if only as a reminder to patients that things do get better. He still has some lung issues caused by his immune system being over-reactive. A relapse of his disease is a bigger worry. But he’s teaching, writing, reading and running again for exercise when his lungs don’t slow him down. He loves Prince, so his daughter bought them tickets to a concert at Madison Square Garden this December. The option to attend a concert is just one more sign that his life is returning to normal — no longer immune-suppressed and fragile, it’s safe for him to be part of such a large crowd.
There’s no denying that cancer is still on his mind, but having successfully made his trip up the stairs, the rest of his life is, too.
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