Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

write Thomas a detailed e-mail, running through our entire experience yet trying to remain as objective as possible. I let him know about the daunting prognosis, the disappointing doctor visits, and yet the hope we had for Dr. Vokes’s course of treatment. After all, he cared so much that he deserved to know the full extent of what Grant was going through. I also knew how proud he’d be to know what a strong leader he still was at the restaurant, and how much his support of Grant meant to him. I welcomed any questions he had and offered him a place to stay if he wanted to visit, as I suspected he no doubt would.

I couldn’t help but feel that I was writing a letter not to a mentor of Grant’s, but to another member of our family, even as I felt that I was betraying a bit of trust that Grant had placed in me.

Nick called to say he was arriving in a few minutes to pick me up for my first chemo treatment. I got dressed, and oddly I felt better than I had in months. I was wearing two morphine patches on my arm, so I was definitely feeling no pain. Because of that I ate well, slept great, and, despite the fact that I was pumped full of narcotics, I wasn’t in the least bit tired. I was amazingly clearheaded.

Three days earlier I was convincing myself to avoid surgery and simply die. Then we met with the team at U of C and suddenly I was entering treatment. I really had no idea whether this was the right decision, but it was the only course of action I had.

It felt great to actually be doing something, to fight this in some way.

It felt great to have a chance.

I hopped in Nick’s car and we headed south down Lake Shore Drive.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Yeah. I feel good,” I said.

“I bet you do—you’re toasty!” he said and laughed. “Keep a few of those patches around for the crew, just in case we get sick of dealing with you.”

“Naw. It won’t be that bad. I’m ready for it.”

“Dude. Get steely. Get steely. I watched my dad go through mild chemo, and it sucked. It won’t be bad at first, but it’ll get there.”

“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said and laughed. But I knew what he was talking about. I was, of course, terrified. “What is chemo, anyway? What do they do?”

Nick looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Are you fucking kidding me? You didn’t look this shit up?”

“Nope. I started to look at the stuff on the Web and it just freaked me out—the surgeries, guys with no necks—fuck that. That’s why I keep you around.”

“Well, it really is nothing, procedurally speaking. A slow IV drip into your veins of highly toxic shit that tries to poison the cancer cells. It generally does a good job of that, but the problem is, it kills a lot of good cells, too. So basically, it slowly kills you from the inside out, hopefully killing every single cancerous cell while leaving the rest of you intact enough so that you can recover and live. But today, all I expect that will happen is that you’ll sit there for a few hours with a needle in your arm and then go home.”

“Really? That’s it? We can work on the book. I brought my laptop.”

We arrived at the medical center without getting lost. Small miracles already.

A nurse said, “Well, hello, Mr. Achatz. Welcome. I’ll take you up there, but first we’ll take some vitals. This will be routine. Every time you come in, more or less, we’ll take your weight, blood pressure, temperature, sometimes a blood sample—just to make sure you’re progressing along okay and getting everything you need nutritionally. We also mix the chemo to your weight each time so we know you’re getting just the right amount. So we’ll do this, then you’ll wait over there while the lab mixes up the potion. Sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it takes a long time, depending on the hour of the day and how busy we are. They do their best to be quick, but with this sort of thing you kinda want to get it right, right?”

Damn, she was cheery.

Soon enough, we were led to a large room that was bisected in the middle by a nurses’ station. All along the outside were a series of curtained-off enclosures, the kind you see in an emergency room. Along one wall there were glassed-in versions of the same. I got the feeling you didn’t want to end up in one of those. It was all brightly lit with a buzzing staff. It all seemed so normal.

As we walked along the line of stalls I could see the people sitting there, IVʹs standing on poles behind them, reading magazines, sleeping. No one looked too terribly sick, but I couldn’t help thinking to myself: All of these people have cancer.

I looked at Nick, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing. In fact, he looked more fearful than I felt.

We came to the second-to-last little stall, and I was told to sit in what looked like a firm-backed La-Z-Boy. Nick perched on a stool. He was looking kind of grim.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He looked up and forced a smile, but I could tell something was bothering him. “Nothing,” he said. He was lying.

He paused a second and could tell that he wasn’t fooling me. “Last time I was in one of these places was with my dad,” he said. “I went with him once or twice. We talked about life and such, but it was depressing. Neither of us wanted to talk like that, so we just talked about business and stuff. He eventually told me not to bother coming—that he would like to read or sleep. I should have gone more.”

“So let’s talk business, let’s work