Free It Takes a Worried Man by Brendan Halpin

straightened out. I am in no way above milking my situation to get better service, so I say, “Look, Kirsten has breast cancer, and the last thing I want to be dealing with right now is this asshole.” He takes care of it.
    I do take some comfort from the fact that the email seems to reveal that he doesn’t know Kirsten is sick. This comforts me, because several people on our old street know, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it got back to him. And he is the only person in the world I don’t want to know, because I know it would make him glad.
    I spend a couple of days composing replies about how rich it is to be called weird by a guy who I’ve seen yelling obscenities and chucking his dinner across the back yard, about how ironic it is to be called a kid by a 40-year-old childless musician who thinks he has a lot of responsibility because he swears at contractors a lot, but eventually I realize that what he really wants is for me to get into this with him again. I sort of want that too, but I realize it would be pointless. He is never ever going to read a put down from me and go, “by gum, he is correct! I’ve been an abominable cad!” So if I can’t convince him, what’s the point? There is no point. I add his address to the “blocked senders” list, and it feels pretty good.

Fever
    Kirsten’s counts are low. I’m not exactly sure which counts we are talking about here–white blood cells? T cells? –but anyway, they say that about a week after you get chemo, your counts get low. This is because the chemo kills the cells in the pipeline, so to speak, rather than the ones already in your blood, so when you are ready for this week’s infusion of white blood cells, you find yourself a little short.
    She is under explicit instructions to keep an eye on her temperature, and if she runs a fever of 101, to quote Dr. J, “that’s an automatic overnight in the hospital.” It is Saturday, and Nan is here, and the two of them are consuming just awe-inspiring amounts of chocolate, and Kirsten feels a little hot, so she begins taking her temperature obsessively. She has the thermometer in her mouth like every 20 minutes. I just have this feeling that we are definitely headed to the hospital soon.
    I am right. Her temperature creeps up as the day goes along, and late in the day she announces, “one oh one point five,” and I page the doctor  and get no response, so I hang up and page her again, and she eventually calls and says yes, go to the emergency room, and I think, great, emergency room on Saturday night–we’ll have to sit there for hours while they process the car wrecks and gunshot wounds. I am freaking out, because she is going to have to spend the night in the hospital, and this reminds me that soon she’ll have to spend three weeks in the hospital, but mostly it just sucks because we were having a really nice, relaxing Saturday at home, and now here’s cancer again, reminding us that we don’t have a normal life. I am also kind of freaked out because, you know, she has this compromised immune system, and she has a fever.
    Nan is also freaking out, but Kirsten is shockingly calm. In fact, when I drop her off at the emergency room on the way to park in the garage, she says, “Okay, well, I guess I’ll call you when they get me into a room,” and I have to explain that, no, we are just going to the parking garage, we’re not going to just drop her off in the emergency room, and she says, “Oh, okay, but, you know, don’t feel like you have to. This is really no big deal.  Dr. J said this happens to everybody.” She means this,  and I know that’s true, because I was there when Dr. J said that, but it doesn’t make it seem any easier.
    We wait in the waiting room, and I look around at all the sad and depressed faces. It’s tough to tell who the sick ones are.  Everybody looks tired and morose. One guy sitting near us was, I overheard the security guard saying, kind of laying on the