Chapter 4: Tea Party
Saturday, May 22 – 11:57am
start with the chemo starting, Dr. Hansen being there, the mechanics of it…leave a boring lull and THEN have John visit when Betsy hallucinates
“Hey John!” Olivia called out, her arms full of sandwiches and drinks from the cafeteria. “It’s so good to see you.” She hugged him as best she could around her loot and the box he was carrying.
“Shoot,” he said, “I wish I had told you ahead of time that I was bringing food for you. We’ve started a meal train, so stop wasting your money at the cafeteria. Unless there’s something there you really want.”
They exchanged a look and both chuckled. John was a pediatrician here at Children’s Hospital, their neighbor two doors down, and had just become the assistant pastor of their church. Olivia was so thankful to have him walk through this with them. Just having someone who cared nearby somehow soothed the fear and uncertainty. It wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t so sharp, so all-consuming.
“John, I’m still just so glad you were home Thursday night when we had to take Betsy in. I can’t imagine how stressful it would have been to bring all of the girls or for Nico and I to be apart.” She winced. It had been several years since Sarah passed, but Olivia still felt sad and awkward whenever conversation brushed up against reminding John of his widower status.
He smiled, not noticing. “Umma was thrilled to spoil your girls. She also didn’t listen to them when they insisted they’d already eaten dinner. Which brings me to this,” he said, rattling the box. “Spicy seafood soup, plenty of rice, bulgogi, I think some chocolate chip cookies, that weird kimchi variation that Nico said he liked once. You know he’s going to be eating that stuff until the end of time, right?”
“Your mother is too kind. I don’t know how she manages to prepare so much food.”
“Skills of a Korean mother over a lifetime,” John said wryly. “Oh, and we’ve got a rotation figured out for caring for the girls over the next week, just in case. Kids usually go home between rounds of chemo, so hopefully, it won’t come to that. But if it does, we worked it out so that you and Nico can both be here.”
They had reached the door to Betsy’s room, but Olivia’s breath was stuck behind a lump in her throat. “John,” she started. “Thank you—”
“Stop, you’d do the same for any of us,” he said, waving her off as he slid the door open. Betsy was asleep and Nico was near dozing in his chair.
“How did it go this morning?” John whispered as he sat in the remaining chair near the foot of the bed.
“She was in decent spirits while the chemo was running,” Nico said quietly. “And it felt a little underwhelming, to be honest. They just hang a pouch on her IV pole and run it into her port. That’s it.”
Olivia found herself nodding. She, too, had expected chemo to feel momentous, or at least to feel like something, but it felt run-of-the-mill now that their world suddenly revolved around all things hospital.
“But after Mitch, Christine, and Pastor Logan left,” Nico went on, “she got really sleepy. The nurse said to let her sleep as much as she wants. She’ll be up a lot to use the bathroom from all the extra fluids they’re running, so we’re just supposed to go with the flow and let her sleep when she wants.”
“Like having a newborn,” Olivia said. She could hear the sadness in her own husky voice. “Like having a newborn…but everything is sad and scary.” Her eyes were wet with tears and Nico reached out to grab her hand, tight. She squeezed his hand and her tears back and settled on the foot of the bed, trying not to disturb Betsy. “I’m sorry, it’s just a lot.”
“Don’t be sorry,” John said firmly. “There’s a hard road ahead of you. We’ll be with you, all the way, but it’s still going to be lonely and hard. You have to take care of yourselves, the way I’m sure you wish you had been able to when the girls were babies. Sleep when you can, take shifts so your head isn’t here all the time, eat well, exercise to get out the stress.”
“Yes, doctor,” Nico said with a playful salute.
John rolled his eyes. “Say what you will, but it’ll be important. And beyond just managing the stress, you’ll also struggle against a lot of emotions. Guilt. Anger. Resentment, fear.”
He paused. Olivia could see his thoughts a million miles away, like he’d been plopped right back into losing Sarah, like it was still as fresh as ever.
John cleared his throat and opened his Bible. “I’ve always found the Psalms to be the best place to turn when I don’t know what to do with my feelings. David had a lot of feelings and wasn’t afraid to—”
Betsy giggled. Olivia swiveled around to look at the head of the bed where her daughter lay. Betsy’s eyes were closed, but she kept on giggling. “Gabby, let’s go get Sophia and have a tea party in the car,” she said.
Concern bloomed in Olivia’s chest, but tenderness for her sweet girl tried to steal its place. Is this normal? she wondered. Betsy was never one to sleep talk. But was getting caught up in a fantasy tea party in the car with her sisters a bad thing? “Should we get the doctor?” she heard herself asking.
Nico brushed past her and laid his hand on Betsy’s shoulder. “Honey, who are you talking to?”
Betsy opened her eyes, blinking heavily, and looked at her father. “I’m talking to Gabby.”
Sweat gleamed on Nico’s brow, the way it did whenever he watched the girls do monkey bars. “But, sweetheart,” he whispered, “Gabby isn’t here.”
Betsy cocked her head. “Yes, she is, she’s right—” She stopped talking as she turned to her right and saw her IV pole and the door. “Oh yeah…well, I was just with Gabby,” she said plainly. Her eyes fluttered, like a toddler fighting a nap, and she was asleep again.
Nico’s eyes went wide, his forehead still glistening. “John, what just happened?”
“Chemo drugs, even at a low dose like this one, are very powerful. They can cause altered mental states, ranging from pretty mild to more severe.” John had put on his pediatrician voice, authoritative but calming. “I think Betsy dreaming something sweet about her sisters is nothing to be overly concerned about. And the drugs will get flushed out of her system once they’ve done their work.”
“So you don’t think there will be long-term consequences?” Olivia said, her voice shaky.
John sighed. “I can’t say that. Some people experience heart or organ damage. It can mess with dental health, reproductive health. There are, unfortuately, so many things that chemo can mess with. It really depends on the individual and the dosage. Thankfully, Betsy has a well-established, short-term protocol. And as a church, we are praying for her every day, both for treatment now and for full healing in her body.”
Nico nodded. He pulled his chair closer to the head of the bed, closer to his baby. He wiped his forehead and silence descended for minutes that seemed to stretch into eternity. Hospital time bends the laws of nature, Olivia told herself as she watched her husband stare at their daughter.
She cleared her throat. “John, you were saying something about Psalms, I think?”
“Oh, yes.” He sat up straighter. “I was saying the Psalms meet us in hard times. We see people pouring out raw emotion before the Lord, and that he can handle those feelings and fears. In fact, we see the psalmists come around to realizing that God is for them, that they’ve seen evidence of that before, and that they can trust that God will bring them through their present circumstances as well.”
Olivia nodded. This wasn’t exactly news to her, but just as the hospital bent time, it seemed to bend her brain, making everything fuzzy beyond the immediate—and her prayers were stunted to simple cries for help.
“Where would you start if you felt…” she began and trailed off, staring up and away as she searched for a word. “Hopeless?” she said, barely a whisper, as if she were willing it not to be true.
John was thoughtful a moment. “I went to Psalm 102 when—”
“‘My heart is struck down like grass and has withered; I forget to eat my bread,’” Nico said. “‘Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my flesh.’”
Olivia pulled back in surprise. “How did you have that one in your back pocket and didn’t share it with me?”
Nico shrugged. “We memorized it a long time ago as a family, just in Spanish. I actually reread it this morning—but in English. My parents wanted to reassure us when they both lost their jobs when I was like ten or eleven. They wanted us to have words for how broke we felt but that promised us something true.”
“So how does it end?” Olivia asked, her eyes soft.
Nico blushed slightly. “I have to admit, I don’t remember all of it. Spanish or English.”
John flipped in his Bible. “In the end, it says of God, ‘but you are the same, and your years have no end. The children of your servants shall dwell secure; their offspring shall be established before you.’”
“Yeah, that sounds right.” Nico said. He smiled into a memory. “We used to recite it together on their anniversary, a reminder of what we had been through and the promise they were clinging to for us and their legacy. I guess we stopped somewhere along the way, and it fell to the back of my mind.”
Olivia brushed her fingers down his arm and gripped his hand. “I never knew that. I guess we’ll have to bring that tradition back.”
“I guess so,” he agreed, giving her a quick kiss.
“‘Their offspring shall be established before you,’” Olivia repeated.
John nodded. “I can’t lie. This is going to be hard. Things are not going to go according to the neat outline they gave you. Hopefully, most of it will, but at least some of it won’t—and you won’t know which until you’re already in it. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be scary. But God will bring you through.”
Olivia inhaled deeply, looked back at Betsy. “Yes, he will.”
Teach Me to Feel by Courtney Reissig inspired Pastor John’s foray into the Psalms. You can find her book here.
Need to catch up?
Chapter 5: Restroom (next chapter)