JUICE AND COOKIES

When I was in first grade I couldn't wait for recess.  After a morning of hard work reading Dick and Jane, we'd be rewarded with our juice and cookies. There were no juice boxes then, just giant economy sized cans of grape or apple or orange that our teacher would pour  into tiny waxed paper cups.  And we didn't have designer cookies either.  No Organic Fig Newman's individually packaged for optimal pre-sanitized consumption.  No sir.  Just ol' reliable Oreos or Lorna Doones taken out of the carton by my teacher's chalk-marked hands and placed on paper plates.  We'd stuff our mouths with the sweet confections and drink juice until our tongues were stained blue or red or green with FDA approved food coloring.  And when our tummies were full, and we were ready for nap time, we'd lay our heads on our desks and fall to sleep, trusting for a little while that we'd be safe in our slumber.  

Trust.  It's a big deal.  Without it, life would go haywire.  Take stoplights, we trust that whoever is in charge of those stoplights knows how to time them so that we don't go all bumper car on each other.  And airplanes?  Well, we trust that air traffic controllers know how to do their job well enough so that they can juggle hundreds of take-offs and landings on a single airstrip.  We trust that our spouses will love us "until death do us part," and that our families will tolerate us when we exhibit less than stellar behavior because we've been mostly good at other times.  And then, of course, there's the ultimate trust -- that the sun will rise every 24 hours onto a new day so that we can start trusting all over again.

Trust is an essential thing when you're diagnosed with a serious illness.  Suddenly you have to look to professionals who you've never met to make you better, and in some cases, save your life.  It's an interesting phenomenon.  How do you figure out who to trust?  Well, you can get recommendations, you can read reviews, you can meet the professionals, but it still all boils down to, "Can I trust that what you're saying to me is true and that you know what you're doing?"  It's huge, this trust thing.

So you trust. You submit yourself to pokings and prodings, biopsies and surgeries from doctors, nurses, physician's assistants, techs, and a whole host of support staff who five minutes before have been strangers. I can't tell you how many times in the past couple of months I've found myself squeezing the hand of a kind nurse or technician while I'm being put through some procedure that scares the bejesus out of me.  I've become the Blanche Dubois of patients -- always depending on the kindness of strangers.  Again, trust.

For me, one of the most profound moments of trust occurred the day I had to have a port implanted under my skin.  These miraculous little devices allow a person who is going through chemotherapy to avoid being stuck countless times with needles.  It's almost invisible and lives with you for the duration of your treatment. Of course, silly me didn't realize that I was going to have to go through a surgical procedure to get it.  I thought I'd waltz into the hospital in the morning and walk out an hour later with a minimal amount of stress to my body.  You can you imagine my surprise when I was taken into a room, given a surgical gown, and told I'd be going into the operating room a few minutes later.  My reaction?  "I'm gonna have to do what?!?"  Yep, there'd be some serious testing of this trust thing now.

Before going to the OR, an intake nurse came to check my vitals and ask the requisite questions. "What's your birthday?"  "Are you allergic to any medications?"  "What's your favorite Sex in the City episode?"  (No, not really, but I do wish they'd ask me something like that every once in a while just to break the monotony.)  During the course of the inquisition, the nurse misinterpreted my nervousness about the procedure for a fear of dying. "Don't worry, honey," she assured me, "You'll be fine.  Besides, when it's your time, it's your time.  You can just as easily get hit by a car crossing the street to the hospital as die from your disease." (I nodded my head in agreement, but was now so traumatized that I began to crave a paper bag to breathe into.)  Next, so as to illustrate her particular philosophy, she volunteered that she'd previously been a psych ward nurse.  There, she'd had a patient who'd tried to kill himself for years.  He tried drinking rat poison, but didn't die.  He tried jumping out of a window, but didn't die.  He tried every which way to Sunday to off himself, but didn't die.  Finally, he decided that it was a message from God that he wasn't supposed to die.  So he pulled himself together and got better.  Really better.  He got a job, became a model citizen, and even found love, deep, meaningful love with a wonderful woman, and they got married.  After which he promptly got cancer and died.  OH ... MY ... GOD!!!

After imparting her grizzly wisdom, the nurse left me alone ... no doubt to terrorize another unsuspecting patient.  I was now so upset that I snuck back into the dressing room and phoned my sister. "I can't go through this anymore," I cried, "I'm done.  I'm leaving!"  Of course, my wonderful sister talked me down for the hundredth time since the treatment process had begun, and I was able to go back out and wait for the nurse to return.  But she never did, thank goodness.  Instead, the next person to walk into the room was a tall, pleasant looking physician's assistant.  His bedside manner was completely different.  He was calm and kind, and took the time to answer every one of my questions.  He saw that I'd been crying and asked me why. I didn't tell him about Nurse House-of-Horrors, but instead explained my other problem.  "I'm really hungry.  I haven't eaten since early last night and I don't think I'm gonna make it."  "You can have some juice and cookies after the procedure."  My face lit up.  "Juice and cookies?"  "Yep," he promised, "And as much as you want."  Well, that changed everything, I'd be okay.  All I had to do was keep my eyes on the prize.

A few minutes later they wheeled me into the OR.  A staff of five, including my favorite juice and cookie PA, worked to prepare me for the implant.  "How you doin'?" he'd ask every few minutes.  "Okay, I guess. Will I get my juice and cookies later?"  "Absolutely," he assured me.  "Well, then I'm fine."  Even when I was under sedation in twilight sleep I'm told I asked about my postoperative treats.  Something about that simple reward went straight back to that time of innocence and trust.  And when I was finally wheeled into Recovery, my PA made sure to have the staff get me whatever juice and cookies I wanted.  And you know what?  The juice was served to me in one of those tiny waxed paper cups.  I trusted, and he delivered.

So trust.  It comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.  It can be the grand pooh-bah of trust where you put yourself in the hands of a surgeon who will literally work to save your life, or it can be the more intimate kind of trust where you know that a loved one will be there for you when you need reassurance that everything's gonna be all right. But no matter what, you gotta try to find it, because it may just be the one thing that gets you through a really bad day.  Kinda like juice and cookies.