Blood in the tube, blade in the veins.
– Christian Wiman, Zero At The Bone

They hang chemo the way I imagine one would hand over the nuclear codes. The pharmacy doesn’t even start mixing the stuff until you are physically in the Cancer Chair, with lab results back from that morning, a fresh sign-off from your oncologist, and a height and weight from two seconds ago (literally: apparently measurements from a few hours ago were too old. That’s how I found out eating lunch gained me 1.4 pounds). You wait in the chair, pre-medicating in anticipation (in my case, downing some anti-nausea pills; no steroids, thankfully). The chemo bag finally arrives labeled with your name, and two nurses verify the information with each other and then with you (they make you read the label yourself), before they hang it and attach it to the tubing through a super-fancy device (so that none of it aerosolizes during the attachment process and is breathed in by the nurses).

The Cancer Chair is cushy, with a massage setting, presumably to distract you from the fact that freaky chemicals are being dripped into your body. They run it slow the first time, and the nurse is required to stay during an observation period, chatting pleasantly as you both pretend she isn’t there to make sure you don’t arrest or have anaphylaxis. After that she leaves you with a big red button to push if you start feeling too bad, and you’re left to wait out the rest of your ninety-minute date with the drugs.

This is when I discovered that infusion centers are aggressively unproductive places, somewhere between an airport lounge and a kid’s music lesson. You feel like you should be able to get stuff done—when else are you sitting somewhere where no one can bother you?—but in reality you are barely able to do the most mindless of activities. As soon as the chemo started going in (doesn’t burn, but feels cold), I started feeling woozy and tired, just mildly enough that I kept wondering if I was imagining it, until I knew I wasn’t, and there I lay, staring off into space. No wonder no one talks to each other in these places, I thought.

I went back to work the next morning, which is how I found myself standing over an eight-millimeter chalazion with a blade in my hand while feeling queasy. Normally the larger ones are my favorite to excise; the improvement is dramatic. This one had been present over six months, becoming so elevated I could barely flip the eyelid, and when I made the incision, granulomatous material erupted in volcanic fashion. Not the best for my nausea. But I got through it, and even after the interpreter left, the patient stayed to give me silent, ecstatic hugs. We didn’t need words: her face said it all. I swallowed my queasiness and hugged her back.

I paid the price when I got home, crawling into bed bone-tired, where I stayed as my husband fed the kids and shuttled them about. Watching him, I couldn’t help feeling useless. What is it about us, I wonder, that makes us feel we must be productive to have worth? That measures life in miles and minutes, that looks at someone tethered to a tube or succumbing to fatigue and sees them as less than?

As I lay in bed, our very large and fluffy cat came to sit on my chest. I looked at her and thought, this has to be the most unproductive creature on the planet. Once a year, she catches a fly. She leaves nasty hairballs around the house on the regular. Other than that, she just sits around. She is aggressively unproductive, without apology. And yet, that day, she offered so much comfort just by being, purring like a locomotive there on my chest. Before man ever tilled the soil, I thought, God looked at him and said he was good. I could learn something from the creatures who are content just to be.

Apparently rest is something I have to give myself permission to do. There’s a difference between lying down in resignation, and lying down by invitation, receiving the opportunity to do so as a gift from those around you, trusting they can take care of themselves, trusting you are not the one holding up the world, trusting that this is the one good thing you need to do at that moment. Did not an omnipotent God choose to rest the seventh day; did not Jesus often withdraw? What does it mean to rest at his invitation? It probably starts with telling myself it’s okay to not do a single thing, just as I would to anyone I cared about. And so I lay myself down, cat rumbling beside me, both of us with nowhere to go.