Walker Guy

June 17, 2019

I sat in the waiting room of the radiology practice in Reston on Monday playing with my phone when something crashed. The crowd (the room was packed) let out a collective “Ooh!” I looked up. A man with a walker, one of those four-legged contraptions used by elderly people to help them keep their balance, had stumbled, pushing the walker over. A couple of men sitting nearby jumped up to help him off the floor. He thanked them then staggered over and took a seat. A staff person came out and talked to him. He said he was OK.

He was a fairly tall guy, maybe early sixties, and the walker looked too short for him. But I know those things are adjustable for height, maybe he borrowed it and didn’t bother.  The staff person asked about his medical records, he said his scans were done at Sentara in Lake Ridge—my hospital. So I guessed he was there in Reston for a PET scan, same as me. You can’t get that at Sentara. “I’ve had a bunch of them,” he said aloud to no one in particular. So he has cancer, like nearly everyone else in the room.

Just then a technician came in and handed me a CD containing my scan, and Sandy and I left. I thought: I may see that guy again at Sentara. We could meet for CT scans, which you can get there. Then have coffee.

What struck me, as we slogged through the rain out to the car, was the guy’s mysterious spirit. After picking himself up he smiled at the roomful of patients. Safely in his seat, he cracked a joke or two. It lightened my mood, even though along with the rest of the crowd I didn’t see the humor in taking a dive on a linoleum floor.

“I’ve had a bunch of them,” doesn’t sound like fun, either. I guessed his upbeat mood and his jokes came from someplace else. Maybe he knows something about this, I thought—this, meaning being sick. That’s what I went with. It could be he decided that bad news from doctors doesn’t have to kill your soul.

The fellow surely had got some bad news. If my hunch is right, he saw through it. He saw something else, which could be the flip side of a cancer diagnosis: the chance to say so what, I’ve got other things, good things, going on in my life. His hair was long and a little wild, he wore a scraggly beard, a teeshirt, and shorts. It didn’t look like his good thing was a recent winning lottery ticket or any connection to what might pass for affluence. Whatever he was thinking didn’t cost him anything.

So then, what gave him his sense of himself, his fearlessness, was in his heart, which after all is where we find the truth about our lives. He, like others in the waiting room, had had a tough diagnosis at some recent point—maybe not so recent. It would change his life, sentencing him to countless hours in waiting rooms, reciting his birthdate and filling out forms, blood draws, getting weighed, interrogations by insurance people, treatment tutorials followed by hours-long treatments, incomprehensible columns of charges, grinding payment plans, sleepless nights, relentless exhaustion, loss of appetite, racking pain.

So what’s left of life, he asks himself. Family, friends— who stay strong and give strength—if not, then strangers willing to buck you up, pass a good word, like the folks in the waiting room Monday. The docs—you encounter a dozen at least, the surgeons, the “rad-oncs” (radiology), the “med-oncs” (chemotherapy), who quarterback treatment regimens, the platoon of skilled helpers, nurses, aides, and even insurance reps—who understand, or try to understand what’s going on in your life. After all, people don’t get into cancer care without appreciating that it’s a tough line of work.

But the stranger with the wrong-sized walker in the waiting room wasn’t only leaning on others. He had figured something out about himself. That was that his strength, such as it was, or is, came from understanding that after enlisting all those highly trained folks, he needed something beyond himself and the helpers, something that steeled him to joke about his own weakness, to recognize that he had been chosen for a hard road that would challenge his spirit while it attacked his body. And I recognized that he knew that a mysterious Power was available to him, a God that stood with him and even loved him as he willingly took that road.

Looking at him, I couldn’t tell if he were a churchgoer, at any church. We, all of us, saw an unmistakable strength, a little irreverent, maybe, and sensed that his strength came from some rock-hard faith in that Power that signaled to him that his life was good. He smiled again, sprawled back in his chair, moved the walker away with his leg, and looked around, signaling to us that he knew that life, whatever hard detours it may take, should and must be lived without fear.