Inga

The following story, by Lauren Reece Flaum, is excerpted from A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors, Inspiring stories of courage and triumph.

Cancer makes a woman out of you. After that you become a warrior. Survival is not so much about the body, but rather it is about the triumph of the human spirit.
~ Danita Vance

I played a little game with Inga’s face—well, chin mostly, her deep, plunging chin that reminded me of an icicle with its tip snapped abruptly off, I’d never seen another chin like it; it was more a caricature than a real feature. And I had nothing but time to study it, watching her enter and exit my room, sometimes with a Styrofoam cup of chicken noodle soup, sometimes with a printout of the day’s blood counts, all too often with thick plastic bags of toxic fluids targeting my tired veins. Each time she was in my presence, I’d seek out that odd triangular shape and in its recognition know that, somehow, Inga would yet again get me through the difficult day ahead.

The little game involved finding this same slightly askew triangle in the patterns that adorned Inga clothing, in the vee of her wrap-style nursing smock, in the turquoise stones of her bracelet, in the spaces created on her feet by the crisscrosses of her sturdy shoes. I don’t know if she knew she had a triangular theme going, or if it was some deep unconscious reiteration of what she saw when she looked in the mirror each morning getting ready for her hard day’s work as head nurse in the chemotherapy suite. For me, scrutinizing Inga and her chin and her crazy triangular patterning became a ritual. The triangles kept recurring—in her cheekbones and her barrettes and the creases of her eyelids—and finding them never failed to bring me a surprising measure of comfort.

I’ve been in and out of the chemotherapy suite for twelve years now. Besides the nurses and the aides and the volunteer coffee ladies, I’m the rare person that continues to call the chemo suite my home away from home. Twelve years in and out of those antiseptic doors, rounds and rounds of drugs whose lists of just the side-effects take the nurses fifteen minutes to recite: nausea, vomiting, hair loss, skin changes, head ache, diarrhea, fever, chills, bruising, achy bones, itchy skin, toe fungus, shortness of breath, blurred vision, compromised motor control, loss of appetite, not to mention the swift and premature departure of any sense of personal well-being and peace of mind, And that’s supposed to be the good news, the things that happen when the chemo is working.

But Inga, always Inga, made it better. Each Thurs day she reserved my favorite bed by the window with the view of the gray parking ramp and the grayer Iowa skies. She padded into and out of the room in hushed tones. She spoke descriptively in a soothing whisper. And she spoke only when necessary. Inga didn’t laugh at me the time I brought in a stack of bills to pay during chemo. And she didn’t bat an eye when I couldn’t even hold the pen between my fingers when signing the first check and she was left to gather the tumbled bills at my bedside. She didn’t panic—like her colleagues did—the time the tubing unhinged from the IV pump while I was asleep, and blood and chemo fluid flooded the floor. I’ll never forget waking up to a half dozen nurses dressed in garments like from Three Mile Island cleaning up the spill!

Inga was the mother of two—older daughter, younger son—just like me, and her two were a couple of years ahead of mine in school. During the summers, when I would leave my kids home alone so I could go get the chemo, she would leave hers home alone so she could give it to me. We would laugh together, musing at the state the house would be in at the end of the day: chores undone, empty pizza boxes open on the countertop, the potential of a summer’s day squandered in front of security her children had—their mother heading out in the morning in nursing scrubs and sensible shoes, strong and ready to help people suffering from cancer—versus the insecurity my children were dealt, their mother sick with cancer, coming home sicker from treatment. I envied that truth of Inga’s life, along with all that I admired in her cool competence, her quiet authority, and her deep, calming heart, Mostly, I envied Inga and her family that feeling of everyday life . . . before becoming aware of its tragic unfolding in one’s own backyard.

Occasionally, I would bring small gifts to Inga—moisturizing cream for her healing hands, a linzertorte I baked. I’d write her notes about what she’d taught me about illness—its sanctity, its otherness, its necessity as a third urgent presence between life and death.

Inga became a sort of muse to me. When I started writing, I wrote about Inga. I imagined her to be a gardener of root vegetables—beets and onions and carrots and rutabaga—goodness planted so deep it would stoically endure the harsh Iowa winters, so deep her hardy hands would be thick with soil when digging in spring. I imagined her loving her solitude and her family in equal measures. I imagined her in prayer. She could have been a nun.

It was in the spring of 2005, when I was climbing out of the depths of chemotherapy, that I heard that Inga was sick. She’d stopped coming into work. She was on disability. Inga, cancer’s caretaker, was stricken with cancer—a rare cancer of the tongue with a poor prognosis. I wrote to her that day: “Inga, how could it be?” But Inga’s disease was fast and vicious. I never heard back. She soon lost the ability to speak, then to eat, and within a year she lost her beautiful life.

This past autumn, the nurses and doctors in the cancer center dedicated a painting of a nurse to hang in the chemo suite in Inga’s honor. They invited me to attend the ceremony and to read the letter I’d writ ten in praise of Inga that had been published in the local newspaper. The event was held in a back room of the cancer center, a room I’d passed a hundred times when it was buzzing with physicians in white coats, peering at scans and tumors and pictures of luminous bones on light boxes. This day, it was laid out with cheese and crackers and a lime-green sherbet punch that looked a little too much like a chemo agent for my taste.

I was the only patient in the room amongst a sea of faces who had saved my life over and over during the last twelve years. But there was one face in that room that stood out. And it stood out at the chin. Inga’s daughter, Susan, was at the far end of the room, standing between her father and her brother. They were both leaning on her, heads inclined toward that deep narrow chin, like an icicle with the tip snapped abruptly off. The daughter is a replica of the mother, I thought to myself, her complexion as soft, her strength as apparent, her movement as graceful. And sure enough, before I even realized what I was doing, I sought and found in her boots and her bag and her jewelry a series of elongated misshapen triangles.

I read my letter about Inga, about how her dignity made an unforgettable difference in the life of a patient. Reading the words, I worked really hard to hold back my tears so that everything wouldn’t become a blur. I couldn’t stand to miss a moment of watching Inga’s unparalleled brand of comfort still, apparently, so hard at work.