Handle With Care

As I reach halftime, I really feel like I've started to get chemo down. Among the street smarts I've picked up:

• The lunch cart is technically open only to patients, but there are fickle, unpredictable exceptions to this rule. Today Alex was offered unlimited string cheese and vanilla ice cream. When my dad and I ordered black coffees, the aides looked the other way while my dad drank them both.
• Whether or not you need a blanket, you are getting a blanket, and you are probably getting tucked in.
  
• On the fifth floor of the cancer center is the children's hospital, and I never feel so profoundly sad or fist-balling indignant as when riding in the elevator with a family who's pushed to light up five.
  
  

Thank you, Alex, for coming to chemo! Thank you for reading poetry to pass the time, and for agreeing it was a good idea to drive backwards down my one-way street, and for playing Handle with Care and Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie in the car. Where do you look for this hope that you know is there?