This is such a strange moment.  We blew into NYC on a wind of positivity, prayers and blessings.  We have a place to stay for the duration of Bob’s radiation, with a “back-up list” of alternative places to stay should we need it.  We have so many good wishes, help with driving, help for affording the train tickets.  We have friends to visit while here to keep our spirits up, and we have amazing care, and a reasonable expectation of a complete recovery from Bob’s prostate cancer.  He has just been taken in to the OR for a quick outpatient procedure to ready his body for the proton therapy.

And I’m hiding in a bathroom stall, crying.

There are social workers on hand at every minute of every hour, ready to counsel and support patients and family members through their trials.

I don’t want them to find me like this. I just want to be alone to cry.

I can’t say where the tears are coming from.  I’m just…overwhelmed.  I’m moved by the people I see here in the waiting room.  Kind faces, bald heads, a group of patients steadfastly serene, their companions intentionally upbeat.  I see an elderly mother on oxygen and a walker who has made the trip in from Staten Island to support her son.  I see a handsome, robust-looking man quietly attentive as a nurse shows him where, exactly, on his head the beams will be directed for his brain tumor.  I see a bald teenager sitting with her mother, showing her something on her phone.

They are all so damned beautiful.  The nurses, the doctors, the patients.  Including my own Bob.  I tell him he’s drop-dead gorgeous in his blue hospital gown.

And then I slip away and sit here in a bathroom stall, just crying because…because….I don’t know why.  But I have to.  I cry in surrender.  I cry because I know we have to make it through the remainder of the year not knowing whether we will do a good job running the farm and cafe, or a bad job.  I cry because I know, going in, that we are armed with a good prognosis, and the forgiveness and prayers of our customers and friends, and I don’t know how to process all this gratitude.  I cry because my kids are at home without me.  I cry because I now need to be two places at once.  I cry because I am healthy.  I cry because others are sick.

And then I dry my eyes and walk back to the waiting room, where Ula, bless her heart, calls me because she needs help with an algebra problem: An obtuse angle, which is 3x- 25,  and an acute angle, x+5, are supplementary, and she needs to find the measure of each.  It’s so concrete and lovely.  And I know how to explain it.  And we sit there on our phones, reviewing supplementary angles and combining like terms and solving for X.

And then the nurse comes to find me.  Bob is awake, the procedure has gone well.  And I can go and be with him again.