I Get Sprung Day After Tomorrow!

I was already feeling like a rocket ship ready to blast off (to continue the Barbarella theme). Really, I feel as though if I could take an elevator downstairs and shoot out the MD Anderson doors and sprint down Holcombe Avenue like Usain Bolt.

I get to leave Monday! The Protocol (a word to always be capitalized, I've realized, when you're in a hospital) calls for springing me no sooner than +5, that is, five days after the infusion.

And then, I ordered in breakfast from outside the hospital and had my first decent coffee in eight days.

Oh my fucking word. Praise Jesus! And Sarah Rice Ecker who, fabulous researcher that she is, found good restaurants close to MD Anderson that I can order from when I reached the point where I could not bear to even look at the hospital menu. Sarah is, as I think you all know, found MD Anderson for me in the first place, allowing me to set up my first appointment there within an hour of me getting that diagnosis. Now, MD Anderson is the Ritz Carlton of hospitals And its menu is incredible and their food service lovely. But it's still a menu for sick people. And I am strong and healthy.

But thanks to Sarah, I have found the world of food delivered in a that is what I am doing for the rest of my stay. (BTW, when I was car shopping, she researched my Subaru Crosstrek for me, too.)

My nurses are AMAZING! They know I hate being cooped up in my room. I mean, even when I lived in New York , every morning I'd get up and do a three or four-mile run in Central Park or up the Hudson. And. then I'd come back and do stretches in our little garden. I started my day surrounded by nature before jumping onto the subway and heading to the hubbub of midtown. Which I loved! But I had balance. And now, of course, I'm surrounded by mountains and nature and sometimes have to turn back if there's a moose on my route and keep my eyes peeled for cougar.

Spending ten days on a single hospital floor is damn hard for me. I do a two-mile walk listening to a walking meditation every morning. I dodge nurses with wheeled carts and the occasional patient on a stretcher. I saw a young nurse weep uncontrollably on the shoulders of two of his colleagues yesterday mroning. These nurses and patient care practioners are so big hearted. One told me she loves working this floor because the patients are here for weeks, often, and she gets to know them. She works three days a week, 12 hours each. But, you've got to be a special kind of person to do this job. And some days, it looks really really hard to me.

I do countless loops on a route that has exactly two windows overlooking the towers of MD Anderson, Houston Methodist and Baylor Hospital. It's as far as you can get from the views I'm trying to see in my head: the sun just starting to light the dark sky and silhouetting the Wasatch or the flame orange of the sun rising over the pond at Spring Bank.

I park myself for most of the day in a lounge that has two walls of windows. The view is still like that of the Jetsons, but it's filled with light. Lots of it.

So my nurses say, "We'll just text you when we need you or when the doctors make their rounds.

And today, my doctor came in to see me! I didn't even have to go back to my room! He listened to my heart, it's still there.

And then he said, "How are you?"

"Oh my GOD," I said. "I just had my first good cup of coffee in eight days! I'm a bit of a coffee princess," I explained, thinking that this is a guy who probably just chugs a slug of coffee out of a styrofoam cup and it comes out of a percolator full of day-old coffee.

"How do you like your coffee?" he asked.

“Well," I said. And I told him about being in Nice to do a story years ago and having a cafe au lait at a cafe on a cute little cobblestoned square. And I told him how I watched the blue-uniformed municipal workers wash off the cobblestones on the square in front of me and seeing the water evaporate in the sun.

“And ever since, I’ve had to have coffee with foamy milk and half and half every morning and for a moment, I’m back in Nice on a sunny spring morning."

He laughed.

"You ARE a coffee princess," he said, and left.

I'm all for all of treating ourselves like the princesses, and princes, that we truly are.