A Room with a View

In about five minutes, Mr. Hospital Scrubs is going to pump something that looks like blue Kool-Aid into my veins and slowly push me into a whirling, deafening CT machine. I'll hold my breath on and off so they can get a better picture. "This is your scan day?" asks a kindly nurse. She is buzzing around the room, handing me a mask, setting up for the blood draw. I nod.

This essay was written for Winship Magazine by Kate Bowler, a former Winship patient.

"Ah, family portraits," she says with a sorry smile.

Yes, I am not alone in this body. I've got company. The machines will have a better look at the two plump tumors in my liver, the smaller, almost invisible other two, baby tumors nearby, and the microscopic cancer cells swimming around in my abdomen.

But everyone is trying their best. The reception volunteers her favorite port nurse to help me today for my big day. The technician jokes with me about Canada's predictably paltry performance in the next summer Olympics. (Give us hockey or give us death.) The nurse offers me a hug and asks if I want to pray over the vial of blood that will tell the oncologists whether I am deteriorating. I do.

Dear God, save me. save me. save me. save me. Again.

In the months since my diagnosis, it sounds weird to say that I am grateful. But I am grateful. I have lived past the regular appointment time that someone like me with an unexpected stage IV cancer diagnosis should live.

I am doing things I never thought I would do again. Like hike a mountain.

Last month I was in the mountains of North Carolina with Katherine, one of the Great Besties of all Time, and we were just stupid enough and just enthusiastic enough to sign up for a hike up the Blue Mountain trail. It promised to be short and hard with a spectacular view. It was hard, so I guess one out of three isn't bad...

We laced up our shoes and headed up the trail, only to realize that I had forgotten my water and sunglasses in the car. This was a great disappointment to Katherine, whose two great loves are hydration and retinal safety. But on we went until the trail got steep and narrow, little switchbacks that went back and forth, back and forth, and up, up, up.

We maintained the panting, cheery banter of two girls trying to pretend that we were almost there. We weren't. What seemed, on the map, to be a mile-long hike to the summit was more like a slog through the jungle, hacking away tree limbs as we went.

Katherine noticed it first. The sun breaking through the trees above us. The shining promise of a panoramic view of the Great Smoky Mountains and our great reward: moral superiority over the millions of people who we imagined were sleeping or eating stacks of pancakes at that very moment.

When we hit the clearing and felt the first heat of direct sun, we looked around. A lot. Mostly we were looking at the ground and its big pile of rocks which suggested that it was a campfire site. But no view. There were only trees and trees and more trees and a tiny sign that read: Blue Mountain Summit. It was very official and absolutely pointing to nothing in particular.

Of course, we took plenty of pictures of our sweaty faces with the trees to prove to our dubious spouses that yes, sometimes we do things on our girls weekends, thankyouverymuch.

But sometimes there isn't a view. Sometimes we climb the mountain expecting God to give us a sense of perspective. Sometimes we expect to feel the grandeur of our place in the world. Or maybe the distance we have come. And when we get there, there is only a pile of rocks and a sign pointing the way back down. It leaves us wondering if the exhaustion of the climb was actually worth it.

I am sitting beside the CT machine when I notice it: a glass panel set into the ceiling with a large picture that glows. It depicts a mountain view, the tops of trees and the sky like an endless sea. The sun is breaking through.

I climb into the whirling machine, lie back, and stare at the top of the world. Sometimes in life I get the view, and sometimes I don't. Even when I climb the mountain. And sometimes I am way, way down through a maze of white hallways littered with wheelchairs and the hum of televisions in a sterile room in a hospital gown as blue as the sky.

Kate Bowler is author of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, a New York Times best-selling memoir of coming to grips with stage IV colon cancer.

Bowler, a native of Canada, is an associate professor at Duke Divinity School. She was only 35 and mother of a young child when she became ill. With wry humor and achingly honest insights, she describes the struggle to get properly diagnosed, and a long period of undergoing treatments that weren't working. Her ray of hope in that dark time was finding out she had the "magic" type of colon cancer, for which there was an experimental treatment available in a clinical trial at Winship. She made the long trek from North Carolina to Atlanta to be treated on the trial.

Bowler is currently on sabbatical working on her third book. For more information about Bowler or to order Everything Happens for a Reason (published by Penguin Random House in 2018), go to katebowler.com.