Thursday's Children
New England Scene by Cindy Anderson
Daisy
Three-year-old Daisy Locke on a visit to the clinic.
The playroom is crowded today, warm with bodies and the smell of baking cookies and bright with winter light through a long bank of windows. On the floor a baby crawls from one attraction to the next — a boot, a snaggle-haired Barbie, a crayon. Adults and children step carefully around him. At the far end of the room, bigger boys perched on the arms of chairs play Super Nintendo. The game's electronic twang is drowned by the soundtrack from the Lion King and by the rise and fall of conversation.
The topic at the art table is siblings. "Brothers can be such a pain," says Haley, coloring a fire engine for her own brother, who is in school this Thursday morning. She glances at Matthew, a red-cheeked toddler leaning on his elbows and eating pretzels from a cup. "sometimes they're cute, I guess."
Kristen pats a careworn stuffed animal. "I get mad at my sister when she takes Bunny." She uncaps a pen and adds three rows of tidy orange spirals to an already abundant garden. "He's too special."
Over the children's heads Kristen's mother tells the playroom coordinator, Lisa Scherber, about the family's application to a foundation for terminally ill children. "We want to get her a P-U-P-P-Y," she says, inclining her head toward Kristen. "Soon. Maybe next week."
Lisa nods, and if a shadow crosses her face, it is there only briefly. She squats beside Kristen. "What a beautiful garden. I see corn, tomatoes, lettuce ..." She puts her finger on the spirals. "What's this?" Kristen turns her wide dark eyes on Lisa. "Cantaloupe."
Daisy gets a gentle check-up from a Jimmy Fund Clinic staffer.
For children undergoing outpatient treatment for cancer, and for their families, the playroom at the Jimmy Fund Clinic is the center of the world. During their months or years of therapy, children come to the clinic each week on the same day. This consistency means that everyone sees the same faces from week to week, and it gives the place the feel of any small community. The playroom also offers respite from the needle pokes and IV insertions that often characterize a trip to the clinic. It is a safe place — no nurses or doctors allowed unless they want to play.
As it marks its 50th anniversary, the Jimmy Fund Clinic at Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute looks to an increasingly hopeful future for children with cancer. Of the 8,000 children who will be diagnosed this year, half will be cured.
We're hanging in there…
Like parents at a park or a wading pool, the mothers and fathers in the clinic playroom sit on the perimeter, and they talk. But far from chitchat about the relative merits of Velcro and shoelaces, theirs is the blunt, intimate language of battle.
"It's back into the trenches for more chemo," a woman in
jeans and a plaid shirt tells the man beside her. "Four rounds to
go."
"How's he holding out?"
"OK so far, other than the nausea." The woman's gaze swings
toward her son, one of the bald-headed boys playing
Nintendo. "How about you?"
The man shrugs. "We're hanging in there."
Another woman offers strategies to a couple whose daughter is just beginning treatment: Wrap her belly in plastic during baths to keep the incision for the central line dry. Offer an ongoing assortment of finger foods instead of big meals. Substitute several short school days for a single long one.
The newcomers nod, fall silent. The woman's shoulder is pressed against her husband's, exhaustion etched in their faces. It is clear they would rather be anywhere but here, part of any community other than this one. Their daughter, a beautiful olive-skinned child, sits at their feet and watches the other children. She is set apart both by her reticence and by her full head of hair. She reaches up between her mother's knees. "I'm hungry." The mother rummages in her purse, pulls out raisins and a juice pack, hands them to the girl. "We're lucky she's a good eater," she says.
A small boy with a half-dozen stickers plastered to the front of his shirt stops beside an older girl in a wheelchair. "You remember, Rachael, don't you, C.J.? says the boy's father, stopping, too. "Can you say hi?" C.J. holds out a pinwheel. "Hi C.J.," says Rachael. She leans from her wheelchair and, with some effort, blows the pinwheel. When she sits back, she squeezes her eyes closed.
"Pain, Rachael?" asks her mother. On her lap sits a big three-ring binder filled with the complicated history of Rachael's struggle with leukemia: sepsis, osteomyelitis, pancreatitis. "Do you want morphine?"
Rachael nods. Her mother hands her the pills. Rachael swallows them with apple juice and opens her eyes. Then she smiles at C.J. "I like your stickers," she tells him.
There are sudden wails in the hall outside the playroom. Both Rachael and C.J. look toward the sound; crying is uncommon enough here that everyone stops what they're doing when it happens. Ed, a grandfatherly volunteer who is supervising the art table in his gentle, laissez-faire way, furrows his brow. "What's going on?" A man appears at the entrance with the crying child in his arms. "Oh, it's Craig," says Lisa. "I'll go see." Word makes its way back: The six-year-old had just returned from a radiation treatment to learn that the morning cookie-making session is over; he had wanted to help. At the entrance Lisa murmurs to the father, who carries Craig away down the hall.
At a table in the playroom Lisa scrapes a last batch of chocolate-chip cookie dough from its baking pan back into the mixing bowl. It's a tough job, the dough sticking to her wooden spoon. "Hurry, hurry," Ed tells her, peering over her shoulder. "I am, I am!" she says, wiping the pan with a paper towel. Craig and his father reappear at the entrance. "There you are, Craig," says Lisa. "Can you come over here? I need your help."
The boy looks doubtful but edges closer. He sniffs. His cheeks are still wet. "I thought they were done."
"Almost done," says Lisa. "Could you finish mixing the dough and scoop it into the pan?"
"OK." Craig takes the spoon from her hand. "I'll do it."
Craig's father, Bill, is visibly relieved, near tears himself. It's been a rough 24 hours: Bill tells Ed that he and Craig slept last night on gurneys in the emergency room after Bill brought Craig in with a fever. By the time they had been seen, it was past midnight. "It seemed pointless to drive home just to turn around and come back again." Bill gestures toward Craig, who is wearing his father's coat and no shoes. "That's why he looks like that."
A tote bag of beloved stuffed animals comes along for a visit.
"He looks fine," says Ed. "right, Murray?" Another volunteer about Ed's age, who happens to be his golfing partner, gives a thumbs-up.
The toddler Matthew, who has abandoned pretzel eating to stand on the window ledge, pats Murray's other arm, which is wrapped around the boy's plump middle. "Dah!" he says, pointing. Across the alley, a large building is under construction — a research tower for the Dana-Farber — where this morning ironworkers are laying marble. A dozen men in hard hats work from scaffolds and cranes. They are close enough that it is possible to see the chisels in their hands, their mustaches and cigarettes. Matthew and Murray's goal is to get every workman to wave to Matthew. The strategy is simple but effective: They wait for the men, one by one, to look at the playroom window, as inevitably they do. Then both Matthew and Murray wave, and the men wave back. Someone in the bucket of a cherry picker swings toward the window: he is grinning widely. Matthew squeals and pumps Murray's arm. "Man! Man!" The three exchange waves.
Early on, when the building was little more than steel bones, a child printed his name on paper and taped it to the clinic window. Soon after, in a gesture that would be repeated hundreds of times for other children, a workman spray-painted the boy's name in huge letters across a girder. "It went on like that for months," says Lisa. "Those guys would practically hang upside down to see the kids' names. The kids were so excited, writing and taping and watching. The first thing they'd do when they came in was to go look at their names on those beams."
Then one day the foreman came to the clinic and asked for Lisa. In his hand was a wad of bills secured with a rubber band. He gave it to her: "here. This is from us for the kids," he told her. The foreman has returned several times. "He's always pretty emotional. He won't come into the playroom, just to the door. He hands me the money and leaves," says Lisa, her eyes shining as she tells this.
There is an easy exuberance to Lisa, but there is fierceness, too. Three years ago, when the clinic was moving to its current quarters, an administrator wanted to jettison a well-used playhouse. "He thought it took up too much room. He told me he brought his grandkids in, and they played in it for only about 15 seconds. I told him, 'Your grandchildren don't have cancer.' I said, 'That playhouse is coming with us.'" It did.
Craig and another child stack plates of cookies into small plastic wagons. "I've got room for more!" shouts Craig, now recovered. "Let's load 'em up. Load 'em up!" When the children return from their cross-clinic delivery, the wagons will be empty, except for a single plate with two cookies, which Craig will give to his father.
Erica
"I'll give you a hint," Erica traces two lops in the air. "It has ears." She grins, dimples deepening. Her eyes are bright and cloudless — as blue as the small gems that hang from her ears. Her skin is translucent.
We're playing hangman in the infusion room, where the children receive blood and chemotherapy. Already Erica knows it. She pokes my arm. "Come on. It's your turn."
"S?"
"Nope. Ha!" She adds a leg, writes that letter beside the others. "Go ahead." I try again. Two legs. Then a foot. Erica doodles on the edge of the paper, turns restlessly on the rumbled sheets. In the next bed a mother holds her baby, reads aloud to him from The Berenstain Bears. The other beds are full, too: Matthew occupies one, C.J. another. Across the room Kristen lies with her arms folded behind her head, watching Aladdin on a monitor mounted on the wall. Her mother sits with her, taking tiny stitches in a new suit for the toy Bunny — his fifth. Kristen's baby sister sleeps in her stroller. After lunch the infusion room fills up; Lisa and Ed bring games, toys, and crayons. Now this place feels like a playroom. Aladdin is singing to Jasmine. "I can show you the world, shining shimmering splendor..." Erica glances at the monitor and groans. "I've heard that a million times."
I look down at the word. Six letters, ending in T. At first I played haphazardly, now I'm taking too long. Erica's gaze wanders from bed to bed, from child to child, then stops at an IV stand hung with a bolus of blood. "That's funny red medicine," she says. She looks up at the plastic bag that hangs over hear head. "Not clear like mine."
The medicine that runs from Erica's IV through a catheter inserted into her heart is cisplatinum, which doctors hope will prevent the brain tumor they removed at Christmastime from metastasizing into her spinal fluid. The drug has a nasty reputation, and during the coming weekend, Erica will feel nauseated, exhausted. Of the little hair she has left, more will fall out.
Still, on Monday morning, Erica will be seated at her school desk with other first-graders, catching up on consonant blends and the intricacies of double-digit addition. And a week from today, when she shows up in the playroom on Valentine's Day wearing hiking boots and a red dress, Erica will hand out frosted heart-shaped cookies she baked herself. She adds a second foot, the last touch. A finished figure dangles from the noose. "You lose," she says. Her smile reveals a mix of baby teeth and big, new ones. "It was RABBIT, you know, ears, floppy ears."
"Play me again?"
Reprinted with permission from the September 1997 issue of Yankee Magazine
