The Nurse pulls the sheet back as I lay on the cold metal table waiting for the MRI.
"What?"
I'm inside a tubular machine to determine how much the cancer's spread and can't see the foot he's examining.
"Oh," I finally recall, "my daughter put a tattoo of a Birthday cake on there."
After serious inspection it, he huffs, "It is a birthday cake."
Placing headphones over my ears, he leaves the machine to beep, hum and whirl as an electronic female instructs, "Breath in ... breath out ... relax" interrupting Bob Dylan's "Murder Most Foul" that I chose to listen to for the hour of laying still on a cold plate of metal.
Inside the tube I giggle, thinking "I've got pancreatic cancer and he's worried about a temporary tattoo."
Yesterday, as I sat on another metal table for an Octeotride, our 3 year old Che confesses to her 16 year old sister Laurel, "It makes me sad Daddy's sick ... It makes us all tired ... I miss my Daddy ... I wish he wasn't sick."
Cancer doesn't just conduct terrorist attacks on my body, it blankets our home.
Che's right!
Sarah's exhausted from managing her work, teenage girls, a 3 year old, a sick husband while navigating the American Health Care system and trying to care for herself.
Three girls are weary of growing into adulthood with diminishing options while forced to incorporate a sick Stepdad's schedule as their mother carts him off to yet another Doctor's appointment.
Che's tired of having no one to play with and her old man's isn't always capable of doing everything they used to do together.
And I'm sick of it too ... of living in a pandemic, gross unemployment, race riots, police brutality, an absence of moral leadership ... Hell, the vacancy of any leadership ... with a loving yet exhausted wife and kids makes living with cancer all the more depressing.
Most days I manage well, doing everything I can to make things easier for Sarah, fun with Che and tolerable for the girls.
The demons are kept at bay by the constant search for moments of joy or slipping into the fantasy future my wife and I share of life on the little island surrounded by aqua-teal water where it's never winter.
When these fail we take it out on each other of course, because there's no one else to take it out on.
Love somehow gets us through these travesties of coping with lives that aren't always fair.
Maybe that's why when Che's sick and tired of all of us being sick and tired, as she misses the Daddy she's used to, and wishes things were like they were ... she plants happy tattoos on my foot.
She puts them on her sisters faces.
On her Mother's arms.
She plaster them on the walls of the house.
They're to remind us of how it's going to be again ... edging us closer to the fantasy future we know is ours.
