Forest Fires and Falling Stars

A Voices from the FOLD: Year 7 original essay (finalist for the the 2020 Indigenous Voices Awards).

BY TREENA CHAMBERS

The sky has been thick with smoke off and on for the whole summer. Everyone we know is either fighting fires or watching the sky for rain. Treesa’s boyfriend and his buddies are firefighting about an hour from our grandparents’ farm.

“I think with Roger here guarding us and the cows between us and the mountain we’ll be safe from your Sasquatch.”

“Don’t be a bitch.” I laugh. I have an irrational fear of being kidnapped by Sasquatch. It is so dark overhead that the milky way feels almost touchable. Roger, my grandpa’s collie is snoring beside us and chasing something in his dreams. Hopefully it’s Sasquatch but I doubt it. Roger is loveable but useless.

Treesa giggles. “Whatever.”

“That was quite a drive. Glad the smoke has cleared a bit. We can breathe. Well, expect for the cow crap. Eww.”

We wanted to come and hang out with no parental units watching over us for a few days. We begged our parents to let us stay alone in our cabin on our grandparents’ farm. Surprisingly, they agreed. We won three whole nights to ourselves. It doesn’t seem like a lot of time; except I haven’t been more than three feet away from an adult since I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in February, a year and half ago this August. My own personal surveillance state.

“I was a bit worried when we had to drive with my door open so I could see the yellow line on the side of the road.” I laugh again. The boys had the afternoon off, so we decided to chance the drive, despite the fires and smoke, and hangout at the lake with them. As we were returning to the farm the wind shifted and smoke covered the highway. For a few hundred metres we crawled along hugging the center yellow watching, hoping that no one was coming our way.

But we made it back and we scored some beer from the boys. So, on our last surveillance free night we are laying here on our backs in the grass, looking up at the stars and drinking contraband. The bats overhead are eating the mosquitoes that want to eat us, and the cows in the field next to us are huddled up sleeping.

Usually I close my eyes or look out the window while a chemo nurse pushes it in. I can tell when they’ve finished administering it by the metallic taste that forms in the back of my mouth.

“Yeah. Probably not our best decision to drive to New Denver this afternoon,” Treesa says.

I even got to sit in the sun for a bit. I regret it now. I am burnt to shit and I can feel a cold sore coming on. But it was worth it to be a teenager for a few hours. This is our last night alone. The parents and various aunts, uncles and cousins will descend on the farm tomorrow. I’ll have to explain the sunburn and cold sore. But that’s tomorrow.

“I guess we get to play bingo when everyone arrives,” Treesa says.

“Oh god. Don’t remind me.” I try to take a drink of my beer without sitting up and spill as much as I get in my mouth. Our few days alone have been wonderfully unpoliced. We swam in the lake, it was fucking cold, ate crap food, it tasted great, and hung out with the boys when they weren’t working. Our lazy days will change when everyone else gets here.

Treesa and I have a game. It’s our version of sickkid bingo. There are squares; like remind Treena to stay out of the sun; check to see if Treena has gargled to avoid mouth sores; tell Treena to put on a hat; ask Treena if she had a clear bowel movement this morning. The complications during my last chemo session will have the adults on hyper alert. It won’t take long to fill up a card. “Was it bad?” Treesa asks.

I know she’s talking about my last round of chemo. “It wasn’t great.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” I say rubbing the back of my hand with the tip of my finger.

There had been a problem with my IV. The fancy description is that the IV went interstitial. Which means, in non-doctorish terms, that the tip of the needle broke through the vein and pumped liquid into the tissue around it. The nurse blamed me for dislodging the IV needle and I blamed her for not listening to me when I said that the vein she chose was too weak for an IV let alone the poison of the day, Adriamycin. All chemo drugs are a bitch, but this one has an added bonus. Its red colour makes it look angry. I can’t even watch when they push it into my IV.

I don’t like to watch chemo go into my body. But there is something about this one, the red liquid disappearing under my skin, that I find particularly unsettling. Usually I close my eyes or look out the window while a chemo nurse pushes it in. I can tell when they’ve finished administering it by the metallic taste that forms in the back of my mouth. The drug’s tasty reminder that mouth sores are a potential future gift.

This time it hurt before I could taste it. A burning feeling brought tears to my eyes. The chemo nurse didn’t notice, but the ward nurse did. She was chatting to me about soap operas to distract me. With the exception of a few exceptionally dramatic moments where I lost my shit in a BIG way, I don’t easily dissolve into tears. So, she knew something was wrong when I just stared ahead with watery eyes instead of making rude comments about my soap star crush.

The drug burned a three-inch line in the back of my hand before they got the IV out. Because so much IV fluid leaked in it took a few days to assess the damage in my hand. What the nurse had assured me was puffiness from the prednisone I was taking when the IV started had actually been saline seeping under the skin. We had to wait while my body absorbed the saline to get a good look at the damage the chemo had done. It left an angry red map of the vein and burned a divot through a bone in my hand.

The IV nurse felt bad she hadn’t listened to my warning. When she put in a new IV her hands shook and she had to pretend she wasn’t crying. After three failed tries to get a new line started in my other hand, she had to use a vein in my foot. Which meant that I was stuck in bed with an immobilized leg and all the indignities that come with that. Bed pans. Crappy hospital gowns instead of my own pajamas. Worst of all, no way to order out take-out food, because I couldn’t walk to the nurses’ station to use the phone.

I tried to make a joke, to lighten the mood in the room. Maybe it was because I went with the easy pin cushion metaphor that she didn’t laugh. Or, maybe four needles and an angry red stripe emerging on the back of my hand meant my ‘joke’ was more mean than funny.

I had known there was a problem as soon as the IV went it. I could feel fluid pooling in the back of my hand almost as soon as it started. But who listens to a fourteen-year-old? What would I know about IVs? After all I’ve only had about two or three a month for the past sixteen months, what would I know? The IV nurse went to school for this.

It had been a hard week. The veins on the back of my hands are so tired they refuse to stand up anymore. And man can I relate. The beers, the boys, the sunburn and the stars have been good medicine. I feel closer to normal than I have in a long time.

“I only have two treatments left,” I say into the night.

“Wow. What happens after that?”

“I guess I’m cured,” I say. “Though no one is willing to use that word. I can’t believe we’re almost through this,” I add and after a beat, I say: “I’m sorry.”

Sometimes I think about how much of our lives have centered around me for the past two years and feel guilty. I stole our parents from my sister and brother. Vacations and parties had to be planned around my chemo schedule. Every twenty-eight days I made my way to a hospital with one or both of the parental units. Important birthday dinners, hockey or volleyball games, or report card celebrations/recriminations were always second in importance to how I was feeling.

“What the fuck are you sorry for?”

I laugh at Treesa’s response. She’s generous in a way she doesn’t have to be.

“Are you excited about being done?” she asks.

“I guess so. Nobody will say cured. So how done can I be?” Chemo sucks, yeah, but it’s better than dying. Hating treatment is easy for people to understand. Being afraid to stop is trickier to explain. Yes, the drugs are killing me, but they’re killing the cancer faster. I start putting words around the anxiety that has been with me for a while. “This is going to sound messed up. But as fucking hard as chemo is, at least I feel like I’m doing something. Not just sitting around waiting for my body to betray me again.” A tear slips out of the corner of my eye. I want to wipe it away, but I don’t want to spill my beer.

There’s silence.

Everyone else would fill this moment with advice. You have to be strong, Treena. You have to believe, Treena. You have to want to live, Treena. Negative feelings bring negative results, Treena. Not my sister. Fuck, I’m lucky to have her.

“Look up there on the left. A satellite. Do you think mom has them checking on us?” she says.

“Nice redirection.” My hand moves to cover my beer bottle. You can never be too sure in this life. If anyone had the ability to guilt someone into redirecting a satellite to check on their kid mom would be that person.

“I can see the Big Dipper. I can never find the North Star,” Treesa says.