Chapter 5 - Not Comfortable, but Comforted

Nearly two weeks after entering Juravinski, the rhythm of treatment had settled into tests, pokes, medications, and documentation.

I drank fluids and recorded them.

I expelled fluids and recorded those too.

The hospital had an impressive commitment to record-keeping.

When someone is receiving intensive treatment, even ordinary bodily functions become data. Input mattered. Output mattered. Temperature, blood pressure, weight, and oxygen levels mattered.

Dignity, I discovered, is flexible.

The visible chemotherapy was finished, but my body was reacting to what had been necessary to fight the leukemia.

Fatigue arrived. My mouth hurt. My knees complained. My nose bled.

I was not comfortable, but I was comforted.

That distinction became important.

Comfort did not remove the pain. It met me within it.

A Body Made Unfamiliar

For most of my life, I had treated my body like a reliable old vehicle. It might make a few noises and require occasional maintenance, but it was basically dependable.

It allowed me to work, walk, play guitar, take photographs, travel, and participate in family life. I did not wake each morning and give thanks for clotting, immunity, balance, oxygen transport, or tissue repair.

The systems simply worked.

Now every sensation raised a question.

Was the ache significant?

Did the fever require a call?

Was the fatigue expected?

A healthy person may experience a small symptom and ignore it. A person receiving intensive chemotherapy has been repeatedly instructed to report changes because small symptoms can matter.

Concern can lead to wise action.

Anxiety can turn the body into an alarm system that never stops checking itself.

The Crime Scene

The nurses warned me about blowing my nose.

I told them I would be careful.

After one dalliance with a tissue, my nose started bleeding. I dragged my caboose to the bathroom and tried unsuccessfully to stop the flow.

By the time I rang the call bell, the bathroom looked like a crime scene.

With low platelets, a simple nosebleed is no longer simple.

The nurses responded with efficiency and compassion. They did not even laugh when I sat there with two large wads of gauze protruding from my nostrils.

One more sign that I was in the right place.

There is no composed way to sit in a room resembling a forensic investigation while gauze sticks out of your face.

Humour did not reduce the medical importance of the bleeding.

It reduced the power of the moment to redefine me.

I was still myself.

I simply happened to look ridiculous.

Gratitude as a Decision

Gratitude was not always a feeling that floated down from heaven.

Sometimes it was a decision made while holding a tissue to a bleeding nose.

This was not forced positivity. I did not need to call a bad day good.

Gratitude did not deny what was difficult. It widened my field of view.

The nosebleed was present, but so was the nurse.

The fatigue was present, but so was the message from a friend.

The uncertainty was present, but so was the medical team.

The weakness was present, but so was grace.

The most painful part of the day did not get to claim that it was the whole day.

The Work After the Work

There is a misleading way to imagine chemotherapy.

A person might think the medication goes in, kills the cancer, and then the patient begins feeling better.

The reality, at least in this phase, was almost the reverse.

The visible delivery of chemotherapy ended, and then the side effects developed as my body absorbed the impact. My counts dropped. My energy faded. My vulnerability to infection increased.

The hard part continued after the pump stopped.

I was learning not to interpret delayed difficulty as failure.

My body was not falling behind. It was responding to what had happened.

Recovery had its own timetable.

The Seed

July 24–August 3, 2025

We have grown accustomed to instant, quick, and fast.

Messages travel immediately. Meals can be ordered from a phone. Photographs no longer have to be developed before we discover whether someone closed their eyes.

Speed is useful.

But many things in life would be harmed by speeding up the process.

When I was a child, we planted seeds in egg cartons and set them in a window. We watered them and waited.

The soil offered very little information.

The seed did not provide a progress report. There was no display indicating that germination was forty-three percent complete.

Something was happening beneath the surface.

We simply could not see it yet.

If you continually dig up a seed to see whether it is changing, it is unlikely to mature.

The same is true of healing.

The Quiet Stage

The chemotherapy had done its work, and my body was responding.

At least, that was what the medical team told me.

I could not observe my marrow directly. I could not feel healthy cells being formed. In many ways, I felt worse than I had before treatment.

This is one of the strange realities of cancer care. The disease had been dangerous, but I had not felt as sick as the diagnosis suggested. Treatment made the emergency visible through weakness, bleeding, fatigue, and vulnerability.

If I judged progress only by how I felt, I might have concluded that I was moving backwards.

My neutrophil count had been sitting at zero.

Zero is a very small number, especially when attached to one of the body’s main defence systems.

With almost no neutrophils, I was profoundly vulnerable to infection. A fever could not be treated as an ordinary fever. Germs that a healthy immune system might manage without difficulty could become dangerous.

The precautions were not excessive.

They were appropriate to the reality of a body whose normal defences had temporarily disappeared.

Then the number moved from zero to 0.1.

That may not sound like much. Under ordinary circumstances, no one organizes a parade for one-tenth of anything.

The nurses were excited.

When you begin at zero, 0.1 is movement.

It was evidence that something had begun beneath the surface.

The Burger

After weeks of hospital food, poor appetite, and isolation, Leslie and my daughter brought me a smash burger from a shop near the hospital.

I am a big burger fan.

This one tasted like heaven.

Food during chemotherapy can become complicated. Appetite changes. Taste changes. Mouth sores make eating difficult. A familiar food that still tastes good becomes more than a meal.

It becomes evidence that pleasure is possible.

The burger had no recognized role in treating AML, but it produced a considerable improvement in morale.

For a few minutes, I was not primarily a patient.

I was a man enjoying a very good burger with people he loved.

The Unanswered Question

By early August, the counts were climbing.

I still did not know whether the induction chemotherapy had brought the leukemia into remission.

I wanted remission.

I prayed for remission.

But hope had to become more durable than a prediction.

Hope was not certainty about the result.

It was a posture that allowed me to receive the truth and take the next appropriate step.

The seed was growing.

The soil had finally begun to move.