Below is a story I read for the Columbia Postbac Premed Symposium earlier this year. It’s mostly fact, a little fiction, and a little something in between.

It’s 2007 and I’m sitting in the waiting room of a sperm bank in Memphis with my boyfriend.  His parents have sequestered themselves in the Starbucks downstairs in an attempt to reduce the awkwardness inherent in being at a sperm bank with your son.  It’s not often that, as a 20-year old woman, you find yourself in a sperm bank, but these were unusual circumstances.  My boyfriend Alex had recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare pediatric brain tumor called a pineoblastoma.  It had started with skull-crushing headaches, a midnight trip to the ER, the kind of MRI that sets off sirens in every doctor’s head, emergency brain surgery, and then finally, diagnosis and a ratio: 50:50, life or death.

We came to Memphis essentially as recruits to the sickliest, saddest team on the planet. The silver lining of having a super rare brain cancer that only little kids are supposed to get, but you get when you’re 20, is that doctors really want to study you.  They will even PAY for your medical treatment to look at the weird little killer cells multiplying faster than tribbles inside your body. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital offered just that. You may have heard of St. Jude from the late night infomercials where little bald children stare at you from the screen, possibly to some Enya or Sarah Maclachlan ballad. It’s a fundraising Goliath and, if you have cancer, this is the Rolls Royce of cancer hospitals.  So we pack up and move into the Memphis Ronald McDonald House.

The Ronald McDonald House looks like the inside of a McDonald’s, except without the swirly chairs and the ball pit.  It smells of antiseptic and barbeque, but Alex and I, we can hardly complain. It is a free place to live in a town where we know no one. His parents fly cross-country for the important meetings with radiology and for Christmas, when I decorate a lamp with green construction paper and beads because Christmas trees are laden with germs and are thus prohibited from the RonMcDon. The house is furnished mainly with corporate donations, like the Sleep Number beds that sprang leaks years ago, leaving you to wake up as the filling in a giant mattress taco every morning.   The walls of the industrial sized kitchen, where I cook our meals with the rest of the “primary caregivers,” are covered in multicolored handprints of patients past – each with a name, a date of birth, and for the unlucky many, the other date of.

Two months into our seven month stay, Alex starts inpatient chemo – dose intensive cyclophosphamide and cisplatin with an amifostine chaser, along with autologous stem cell transplant.  Stem cells destined for transplant are laced with the preservative DMSO, which smells EXACTLY like creamed corn when the cells are thawed out, and the scent leaches out of the orifices of transplantees for days after they receive the cells.  The first round of chemo goes swimmingly.  Alex vomits for about three days straight and looks like the walking dead, but the nurses claim he’s tolerating the protocol quite well. Alex becomes so weak that he can’t balance on his own when standing up to urinate, so I stand next to him, an arm around his back, and hold the liquid void container while he leans on me.   Then his blood pressure plummets, his eyes roll skyward, he falls backward into the bed. And then, it happens. I am R. Kelly-ed.  I am showered golden, drenched in creamed corn urine.  For a split second, I’m speechless, in part because I’ve discovered firsthand that creamed corn urine only smells like creamed corn, it does not taste like creamed corn, and I’m torn between ensuring that Alex has regained consciousness and beelining for the nearest bottle of mouthwash.  The liquid void container drops from my hand and I’m bedside, trying to explain to a confused and scared manboy why I look like I’ve gone for a swim in the Mississippi. If the Mississippi was yellow and smelled of creamed corn.

In the intermediate weeks between rounds of chemo, we wait, amusing ourselves in any way we can. He sleeps, I cook. Never with garlic because the smell makes him vomit. He dreams about Subway sandwiches and red bell peppers and the days before he received calories from a giant bag attached to the central line in his chest.  I see my own personality mutating, becoming more and more optimistic, goofy, and even playful to counterweigh his personal apocalypse. We listen to nothing but Elliot Smith.  I clean everything. The sheets and towels and our clothes are washed every single day. I practically use antibacterial as body lotion. He wears a surgical mask when we leave the Ronald McDonald House; we kiss through the mask. My germs could mean his deathbed. Once a week I take an hour to lie in the course crabgrass to tan on the banks of the muddy Mississippi, letting the present reality pool into droplets and slide off my skin.

So back to the sperm bank.  We are there on that day, months before the R.Kelly incident, to freeze a sample of Alex’s sperm in case the impending chemotherapy treatment leaves him infertile.  I spend weeks getting him to think of the future, to think that maybe, someday, whether with me or without me, he might want kids of his own, kids that could be impossible if he doesn’t take the initiative to masturbate on command in a clinic in the Memphis suburbs with his parents waiting downstairs.  No pressure.

And now, five years later, he calls me to see if I want to meet for coffee after he goes to the fertility clinic to see if that sperm bank in Memphis can finally throw his sample away.  Because he’s alive. And he’s healthy. He can’t hide what happened to him; his hairless skull, with its jagged scars, make Frankenstein feel jealous.   Illness is ugly, and gross, and indiscriminate.  Being in the thick of it, amidst the frontiers of cancer treatment, was akin to being at war. Except all the soldiers are bald little children, and the enemy they fight is their own body.  We both bear the scars of this war, but we are incredibly lucky to do so.