My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  It seemed unwise to tell him I was already taking five.

  He continued: “Sleeping pills artificially alter your circadian rhythms. In order to beat your insomnia, you’re going to have to get off the pills.”

  A surge of panic coursed through me. Insomnia made me feel like a prisoner of my mind. Lying in the dark, I had nothing to do for hours but think. I was trapped with my worries. Pills were my only escape from that prison, a way to escape myself. Wasn’t I already facing enough fears this year without taking on this as well? Now I had to face fears at night as well as during the day? There was no way I could do it. Not now. Maybe next year, when my project was over and I’d found another job and I settled back into some semblance of a normal life, then I could focus on tackling this issue. But now? Was he serious?

  Chapter Nine

  Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product . . . For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  And then the hospital called. It had been more than a month since I’d sent in my application. I’d assumed they’d done a background check and discovered I’d been arrested in college for talking back to a cop who raided our party and decided I was a security risk. Instead they told me they loved my essay and had an opening in their volunteer program.

  After an interview, an orientation, extensive medical and drug tests, I was placed as a volunteer with the Milkshake Program, making milkshakes for the oncology ward of the hospital. My co-volunteer was an adorable twenty-three-year-old former gymnast/cheerleader named Becca, who had freckles sprinkled across her nose and was terrifyingly cheerful. Despite all this, I liked her immediately. Our assignment was simple: go from room to room asking if patients wanted chocolate or vanilla, mix the milkshakes, deliver them. The oncology floor was set up like a dorm. Rooms lined a long hallway, each room with its own front door and private bathroom. Many patients had a roommate, the two beds divided by a curtain.

  On my first day, I hung back and watched Becca take a few orders. She was applying to medical school and volunteered in various wards throughout the hospital, so she was accustomed to dealing with patients. At first my voice sounded high, practically falsetto. I spoke in that exaggeratedly nice way that women speak to other people’s children. But after the first few patients, I relaxed and found my groove.

  Most of our time was spent preventing ourselves from infecting patients. During orientation, I learned that one hundred thousand people die every year from infections they contract at a hospital, so before someone could enter a patient’s room, precautions had to be taken. First, patients were assigned to one of three categories to indicate the fragility of their immune system—Hand Hygiene, Contact Isolation, and Droplet Isolation—which was posted outside their door to signal what needed to be done before entering. Hand Hygiene meant coating your hands in sanitizer. Contact Isolation meant coating your hands in sanitizer, putting on rubber gloves, and donning a long-sleeved gown over your clothes. Droplet Isolation meant sanitizer, gloves, gown, and a dense surgical mask that made your breath come out in a dull roar and had a clear plastic window that stretched up over your eyes like a personal windshield. The whole effect was slightly Darth Vader. These rooms also had a negative pressure “anteroom” between the hospital hallway and the patient’s quarters with a special ventilation system designed to prevent airborne infections from traveling in or out. You had to be sure to close one door completely before you opened the other. After leaving each patient’s room, you did The Dump, where you undid everything you’d done a few minutes ago: throw the gloves and/or mask in the garbage, toss your gown in a hamper, and apply hand sanitizer again. Then you moved to the next room and started over. There were sixty rooms in all.

  Back in the milkshake-making room, I shook my head in wonder. “It just seems crazy to risk someone’s immune system over a milkshake.”

  Becca snapped on a pair of gloves. “The benefits are twofold for the patients. They need the calories, and it’s a morale booster. Don’t underestimate the power of a milkshake.” She handed me the ice cream scooper. “So what did you think?”

  I dragged the scoop over the ice cream so that it rolled into a vanilla wave. “It’s not how I thought it would be.” What had I expected? Movie cancer? For every patient to be pale and bald, surrounded by family members who’d shaved their heads in solidarity? “A lot of them look so . . . normal. I’d never know some of these people are sick.”

  “It’s the treatment that causes the baldness, not the disease,” Becca shouted over the whir of the blender. “Chemotherapy kills all cells—healthy cells just repair themselves faster than cancer cells. So it kills the cancer slightly faster than it kills you.”

  Later that night, I popped my usual five sleeping pills and went to bed. I’d run out of the brand of pills I preferred, which knocked me out immediately. The backups took longer to kick in and were known to cause hallucinations and short-term amnesia. Sometimes I’d take the pills and a few minutes later I’d forget that I’d taken them. Then I’d have to dump out the entire bottle and count the pills backward from the date the prescription had been filled.

  Tonight it was just hallucinations. It was my stuffed animals coming to life that clued me in. I lay in bed watching them move next to me, their arms and legs shifting as if they were trying to find a better sleeping position. The first time it happened, I was in the bathroom doing my final pee of the evening when I looked down at the Us Weekly on the floor. The stars in the photos were waving at me. Convinced I was imagining things, I returned to my bed, but I stopped short of getting in. It looked like someone was hiding under my comforter breathing. I could actually see the blanket rising up and down. With a tentative hand, I jerked it back, but nothing was there.

  By now I was used to this. I simply rolled over away from the stuffed animals. I put on a sleep mask so I wouldn’t see the shadows in the room moving on their own, Peter Pan–style. By far the freakiest side effect of the drug was the feeling that there were other people in the room. One time during a conversation with a friend who took the same pills, I mentioned the moment “when the people come,” and his face lit up with recognition. He knew exactly what I was talking about. Sometimes they talked to you and seemed so real that you actually talked back. The weird part was that it didn’t seem weird at the time. My whole life I’d worried about people breaking into my room at night. Now for all I knew, there were people in there, but I wasn’t afraid. And that worried me.

  Even more than milkshakes, the patients seemed to crave normalcy. Most of their human interaction was about their illness. So I acted as though we weren’t in a hospital but in a restaurant somewhere and I was taking their dessert order. If the patient seemed up to it, I played the role of the sassy waitress. I’d wait while they debated flavor options. This was the tastiest thing they’d eat all week, so they took the decision seriously.

  “What do you recommend—vanilla or chocolate? Or should I go half and half? I don’t know!”

  I’d lean in conspiratorially. “I mean, we all know chocolate is the superior flavor, am I right?” Or I’d say, “Let’s go crazy. Half and half.” If they asked for strawberry, I pretended to balk. “Strawberry? We don’t have strawberry. What are you—some kind of health food nut? If it’s fruit you’re after, maybe the nurse can find you a fruit cup. Now are you ready to get down to business?” They loved it.

  I was humbled thinking of the lengths Eleanor went to in order to visit wounded soldiers during World War II. Namely, cramming her fifty-eight-year-old body into a small bomber plane notorious for its tendency to catch fire, then traveling twenty-three thousand miles to Australia, New Zealand, and seventeen South Pacific islands. The five-week trip was brutal. Along the way she lost thirty pounds. Opponents dismissed her goodwill tour as a publicity stunt and criticized her for flying around the world on the government’s dime.
Nevertheless, she worked from sunrise to sunset, driving hundreds of miles between hospitals and camps, meeting more than four hundred thousand troops. She toured countless hospitals, stopping at every bed in every ward, chatting with wounded servicemen at length. Sometimes their injuries were so severe Eleanor had to keep herself from flinching in front of the patients.

  I was learning to steel myself, too, before walking into each room. Some patients were painfully thin. Sometimes they were missing body parts. There was a man who’d had all the toes on one foot amputated. He was asleep when I delivered his milkshake, his foot propped up via a pillow at the end of the bed. It looked so anonymous, like a head without a face. All of the character of the foot is in the toes, I realized.

  One week I walked into the room of one of my regulars. “Hey, Doris! What are you feeling today—chocolate or vanilla?” I asked but only heard wheezing in response. I looked up and saw she had a hole in her throat with a tube sticking out of it. She’d had a tracheotomy and couldn’t speak. I thought for a minute. I couldn’t give her my pen to write with because it was covered in germs.

  Taking care to keep my voice warm and level, I said, “Okay, Doris, how about we play the thumbs-up, thumbs-down game? Thumbs-up if the answer is yes, down if the answer is no. Do you want a milkshake?”

  Thumbs-up.

  “Do you want chocolate?”

  Sideways thumb. What did that mean? She mouthed something that I couldn’t quite make out.

  “Er, so you want vanilla then?”

  Another sideways thumb. Understanding dawned. “Oh! Do you want a mixture of the two?”

  She nodded happily. Double thumbs-up.

  Sometimes there was singing. One week it came from the room of an emaciated woman in her forties, wearing a brightly colored scarf over her head. When I’d stopped by her room earlier, she’d been unconscious, breathing lightly, unaware of the loved ones taking turns holding her hand. Now someone had brought out a guitar and strains of “Que Sera, Sera” spilled into the hallway. I leaned against the wall outside the door for a few minutes, listening. I felt privileged to witness such poignant scenes, but I also felt guilty trespassing on someone’s private moment. Then Becca passed by and, in a sad voice, whispered exactly what I was thinking: “That sounds like a swan song.”

  Down the hall was Mr. Orth, who had become one of my favorite patients. He was a sixtysomething, balding (not cancer balding, but balding balding) former tax attorney and practicing shameless flirt. When I opened his door to deliver his milkshake, he was chatting on his cell phone but waved me in.

  “It’s just my brother,” he said, palm covering the mouthpiece. Then he switched the cell to speakerphone and set it on the table so he could unwrap his straw with both hands. “Hang on,” he said loudly, “there’s a candy striper here.”

  “Is she a hottie?” the voice on the phone asked, clearly not realizing he was on speakerphone.

  “That depends,” I called out. “How hairy do you like your women? If you’re into the Chewbacca thing, I’m your girl.”

  Mr. Orth hooted and asked, “Say, Candy, are you married?”

  Out of instinct, I almost said: Are you crazy? I’m not old enough to be married! I was, of course. Yet the question seemed as inconceivable to me now as when I was a child and the school photographer would ask that to make me laugh and show my teeth.

  “Why?” I asked. “You looking for a tax break?”

  “Do you have a white dress?” Mr. Orth pressed.

  I looked down at my slacks and volunteer smock. “Not on me.”

  “How about you find one, I put on a suit, and we run off and get married?” he said with a wink. Honestly, had he not already been married, it would’ve been the sweetest proposal a girl could hope for.

  I put my hands on my hips and nodded at his hospital gown. “Well, you’re already wearing a dress. Why can’t I wear the suit?”

  There was silence for a few beats and I worried I’d gone too far. Then Mr. Orth burst out laughing, and so did his brother on speakerphone.

  When I stopped by to see Mr. Weiderstein, a man in his eighties, he was surrounded by all six of his boisterous children.

  “Come on in! The water’s fine!” crowed his son, a bearded heavyset man in his fifties. You’d think they were crowded around a table at a dinner party the way they were carrying on, though their father was lying there bedridden, and every time he tried to speak, he could only gasp. Mr. W. was scheduled for brain surgery tomorrow but he could have solid food until midnight tonight.

  “So bring him a large vanilla,” his son winked. “Go big or go home—that’s our motto.”

  “A wild man! I like it!” I nodded at Mr. Weiderstein with approval and scribbled the order on my pad. The group waved cheerfully as I left the room.

  A few minutes later I was still standing in the hallway at an isolation cart struggling to pull on a pair of gloves when the son walked slowly past me.

  “Oh, I meant to ask you,” I said, “who is your father’s nurse?”

  He looked at me with irritation and said curtly, “I don’t know. Whoever it says on the bulletin board.” I turned away, a little stung. A minute or so later I heard great gulping sobs. When I turned back, he was leaning against the wall, hunched over with tears pouring down his face.

  “Oh God,” he whimpered. “Oh God.”

  Oh God. Should I say something? There was no official hospital policy on this. It was a judgment call. When he’d spoken to me a second ago, he seemed like he wanted to be left alone. So I quietly closed the drawer to the isolation cart and padded away. Before I turned the corner I glanced back and saw his sister standing next him, holding him in sort of a sideways hug. I kept going, his moans following me down the hallway.

  During her fourteen years as First Lady, Eleanor received an average of 175,000 letters a year. One such letter was from a destitute young woman named Bertha Brodsky, who apologized for her handwriting, explaining that she was bent sideways due to a crooked back. Eleanor set Bertha up with a specialist, arranged her surgery, visited her in the hospital, and sent gifts on holidays. After Bertha recovered, Eleanor helped her find a job, attended her wedding, and became godmother to her child. The woman was nothing if not thorough. I had hoped for my own stories like this. But since all I could do for the patients was bring dessert, it was hard to feel like I was really making a difference. Sometimes I felt I was actually making things worse. Those are the moments I remember the most.

  One day I was taking a patient’s milkshake order and her roommate, who was a diabetic, overheard.

  “Can I have one too?” a voice called plaintively.

  I walked over to the other side of the curtain separating the beds. An Asian woman in her forties looked at me with pleading eyes. “I’m sorry, but your blood sugar is too high this week,” I said gently. “I’m not allowed to give you one.”

  “Please? I won’t tell anyone.”

  I tried to fathom how sick you’d have to be to be willing to make yourself sicker just for a moment of relief. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  She burst into tears. “You don’t understand!” she said, burying her face in her hands. “This has just been the most awful day.”

  I’m a monster, I thought.

  Becca and I always took the subway home together. When we got to her station, she hopped off and called out, “See you next week!” I reached into my backpack and pulled out the New York Times. At the next stop, a group of kids clattered onto the train, talking so loudly that I looked up from my newspaper. They all wore some kind of school uniform, but two of the boys also had baseball caps. The girls had rolled the waistbands of their plaid skirts to raise the hems to horrifying heights. Another boy was with them, and though he wore the same clothes and haircut, he didn’t quite fit. There was an air of desperation around him, an overeager quality that teens, especially, s
eem to find unappealing. When he tried to sit down with them, one of the baseball cap boys stretched his leg out across the remaining available seats.

  “Uh, did we say you could sit with us, loser?” he sneered.

  The kid, visibly deflated, took a seat a few sections away, directly across the aisle from me. He stared very hard at the subway ad over my shoulder, on the precipice of tears.

  There’s an unspoken rule among New Yorkers that you don’t speak to people you don’t know on the subway. But something about this boy pulled at my insides. I wanted to build a time machine just for him so I could show him that in a few years, he wouldn’t care what these idiots thought. Also, I was still questioning whether I’d made the right call that day with Mr. Weiderstein’s son, and I didn’t want to regret not saying anything to the boy. I leaned forward in my seat, resting my elbows on my knees. I wanted to be close enough that the other kids wouldn’t hear.

  “It won’t always be this way, I promise,” I told the boy.

  He looked at me, startled, clearly wondering if I was a subway weirdo or someone who wanted to tell him about Jesus. The people near us looked at me oddly too. I could feel my cheeks tingle a little but didn’t care.

  Holding his gaze, I said: “People are meaner when they’re younger. They just are. But it won’t always be this way. Once you’re out of high school, you’ll be surrounded by all new people. And almost everyone you meet will be nice to you. This world that you’re in right now, it’s not the real world. Just remember that. One day there will be lots of people who’ll want you to sit with them.”

  I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by waiting for a response, so I went back to reading. A few minutes later, I sneaked a glance over the top of the paper. He was staring off into space again, but with a small smile on his face.

  Mrs. Andrews was in her late fifties. Over the last two months I’d watched her beautiful red hair dwindle to a few select strands. When I’d asked for her order last week, I could tell it had taken all her effort just to listen to what I was saying.