The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

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The Cancer Floors

On the elevators, we are all pressed tightly together. Family members and health care workers angle wheelchairs — a tricky fit — into one of four elevators in which I travel each weekday. Broken and fragile people are shuttled back and forth across the skyway, a glass-enclosed bridge that leads from here into the main hospital building. A daily stream of passengers, numbed by an assortment of daunting diagnoses — emphysema, colon cancer, heart disease — shuffle off and on the elevators like sleepwalkers. Some cry. Many carry oxygen tanks and breathe through clear, plastic tubes. Obese people leaning hard onto their walkers get off at the fourth floor where the fumes of brand-new carpet seep in from the new Diabetes Center.

Some, here for routine medical appointments, stride lithely out the parting elevator doors. Beautiful young women talking on cell phones with Prada handbags on their shoulders exit at the Center for Human Appearance. Doctors in crisp white coats and medical students outfitted with backpacks and clogs squeeze in with the rest of us.

For me, The Cancer Floors, now several, are the least habitable addresses in our building. (This concrete and glass tower is a poorly conceived notion of modernity, I have decided; no window on any of its 21 floors has ever opened to the promise of spring.) The psychologists for the Cancer Center share several small offices on the 20th Floor. Here, the offices are retrofitted and inadequate. Patients and their loved ones must wait in chairs near the elevator or at the north end of the long, stuffy corridor.

When it is raining, the hallway is dark and gloomy. The flashing aircraft beacon on the outside of the building pulses a malignant red across the inside north wall and the people who are waiting here. In the sunlight, the beacon is imperceptible, but then the heat builds up like a greenhouse, and by early afternoon it is stifling. Still, they wait patiently.

I see them waiting for one of the therapists, kindly, caring people who are here to help them make sense of the illness that has cut a deep and sudden chasm through the solid ground on which they stood just a moment before. Waiting for their therapists, they sit in the chairs provided, wearing headscarves and baseball caps. These are the ones who are in the midst of chemotherapy. Because of the chemo, they are vulnerable to infection and perhaps much worse, but here they sit in this public space. Exposed. They wait as a bicycle messenger delivers a mundane package — a long cardboard cylinder containing marketing posters — to the Orthopedics practice next door. They wait as I hurry to my office each morning, carrying my briefcase and a paper-cup of coffee.

They wait as two young men in hard hats hoist lengths of cable onto a cart that they wheel to the freight elevator, the elevator reserved for this purpose, and for the transport of other somewhat dangerous things. Things like red plastic containers filled with spent sharps and white plastic carrying trays crammed with vials of purple-red blood. On the freight elevator, I see these things as they are whisked away.

In the passenger elevator, I see people carrying hefty, hard-back novels or colorful tote bags filled with knitting things. These people are on their way to the Outpatient Chemotherapy Unit on the 15th Floor. These things that they carry will help them — or so they’ve been told — to pass the hours. (When poison courses through the human body, perhaps it is best to remain occupied.) I have not seen the inside of the unit, though I imagine an assembly line, clean and efficient, and, unlike the corridor, this place is quite cold. Here, I imagine people frozen in another uninhabitable landscape.

I saw a woman once at the coffee bar on the lobby level. I suppose she was not much older than me. She ordered a latte. She wore a baseball cap to hide her bare scalp. The cap was embroidered with big block letters that said, “CANCER SUCKS.” Another woman waiting in line for coffee said, “That’s a great hat.”

The cancer survivor said, “Thanks!”

Another day, when we were all packed into the elevator, I saw a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. She was tall and solid-looking and she wore a pair of low-rise jeans and a tank top. She had a wide, cheerful face and an eighth-inch bristle of brown hair on her head. Before she got off at the 15th floor, she told us — office workers going on to higher floors — that her boyfriend had shaved her head the night before. This, before her hair could have the chance to fall out in clumps. A preemptive strike against a formidable enemy. The young woman spoke in a happy, confident voice that made me feel sad and hopeless.

A woman gets on the elevator with me and some other people at the mezzanine level. The woman is short and stocky and she wears a baseball cap, a gray t-shirt, and a pair of baggy, checkered pants. She is busty, but not wearing a bra and her breasts flop around as she moves. This — and the pair of Chuck Taylor sneakers and the baggy pants — paint her as a sad-clown caricature that I am ashamed to have conjured.

Then she turns to me, and I see the downy hair on her upper lip and on her chin. The fine, blonde hair peeking from beneath her cap, too, has begun to grow back. In a brusque voice, she says boldly, “The radiation and chemo just took everything out of my body. It took all my strength. Now, I wanna see’em put it all back, ya know!”

This is before the door opens on 15. I touch the woman’s shoulder. I murmur, “I know,” but I don’t know. Thank God, I don’t know. Now she says, “Does anyone want to get off at the Chemo Floor for me?” She says this with good humor and then shuffles through the open elevator doors, her hands in the pockets of her baggy pants. Then I think of how bravely she has performed for us, her elevator audience.

I am leaving for the day. In the elevator it is hot and sticky. We stop at the 14th Floor and two women get on: one young, one older. The young woman carries a black portfolio (containing what?). She is crying. I think about what kind of papers could be inside. Maybe they are her medical records or those of the woman who accompanies her (her mother?), though I doubt this. I think that it is she who is sick, the young woman who is crying. I think that the papers she carries tell her story of routine health and then sudden, stomach-dizzying illness. She carries with her, as well, anger, grief, guilt, pain, or fear. Perhaps she carries all of these.

She is dressed in bright, summer colors — orange, turquoise, and white. Without her tears, I would describe the woman as perky, neatly dressed, with a pair of white sandals, her toenails painted a glossy fuchsia. But her face is streaked with tears. Strands of brown hair, a neat, straight cut that brushes her neck, have clung to the moistness on her cheeks and forehead. Thin strands that could be a plastic surgeon’s sketch for expertly carved cheekbones or a common facelift.

Not this woman though. She has been to the 14th Floor where the great Cancer Experts reign. Still, she does not trust what they have just told her. She turns to the woman who is with her and says that she will call Dr. Kaufmann immediately. She will do this, I think, because Dr. Kaufmann (whoever he is) has earned her trust. Decisions must be made, but she will not make them without the soothing and trustworthy words of Dr. Kaufmann.

I imagine her thinking, “Thesedoctors here have made a terrible mistake. They cannot know everything.”

For not quite two and a half years, I rode every weekday in one of four elevators and I worked on the 20th Floor, one of the Cancer Floors, until I left my job there. In the glass and concrete tower, I was sad a great deal of the time. I was sad and also angry. For many reasons, not all of which I have discovered. I was soul-sick, but my body was strong.

I felt trapped in that tower with no windows opening to the fresh air of spring. And perhaps I also felt guilty that I was healthy and alive and there was no poison coursing through my body as I lay propped in a hospital bed on the 15th Floor. And I was angry because sick people had to wait in the stifling hallway and they rarely complained. I was angry because (even here) amidst the very best of medical science, often it simply was not enough. I was angry because I suspected that Medicine placed too little stock in tending to the soul. And I was angry because my naivety and hopefulness had suffered so dearly.

One day in the spring, just before I left this building for good, a middle-aged, black woman had been sitting in one of the chairs by the elevator. Her face was gleaming with sweat and she was wiping her forehead with a tissue, weeping silently. I urged her to come and sit in my office where the air conditioner hummed. I insisted that she come and sit where it was cool. There, in relative comfort, she could fill out the stack of forms given to her by the receptionist at the Cancer Center.

She thanked me and she apologized, in equal measure. And when she was done with all of her papers, she thanked me again and I was grateful then that my paltry kindness had brought even a moment of comfort.

A version of "The Cancer Floors" previously appeared in the spring 2006 issue of the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling.

About the Author

As a freelance journalist, Dina Greenberg has developed a body of work that illuminates the intersection of spirituality and medicine. Her work also covers topics such as health care access for vulnerable populations and complementary and alternative therapies (including meditation and prayer). Her writing appears in newspapers, magazines, and professional journals. She is a contributing writer for Inside Magazine, SJ Magazine, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute on Aging Newsletter.

Dina's poetry, essays, reviews, and short stories have appeared in publications such as Bellevue Literary Review, Blood & Thunder (University of Oklahoma School of Medicine), Chronogram, the International Journal of Healing and Caring, Lalitamba, and Well Being Journal.

As a 2006 recipient of the Lilly Scholarship Award of the Religion Newswriters Foundation, the author undertook post-graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania. She contributes, as well, as research assistant/writer on a Metanexus Institute-funded grant to develop a “Directory of Spiritual Practices” for the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps.

Published: January 25, 2007