I met my husband, Kim, on a bone marrow transplant unit in a cosmic display of foreshadowing ten years before the happenings in my piece “Suffer the Little Beagles.” I was First Lieutenant Schuerman serving as a bone marrow transplant nurse. He was a Captain who had ventured up four floors to place his pathology report in a patient’s chart. Over the next decade we married, I became an attorney, we became civilians, I gave birth to our daughter, and we bought a big house. He told me about his deep bruises and enlarged spleen the night we lay exhausted on our bed after having received our household goods.
We drove to his lab at midnight. The tech drew his blood, centrifuged it, held the test tube high in the air with its mostly white content, and asked, “Dr. Murphy, did you have a milk shake tonight?” The tech smeared some blood on slides. Kim grabbed them and rushed down the short hallway and into his office. I stood in the doorway moments later, his head bent over the microscope with slides tossed haphazardly next to it. He spun around in his chair to face me, and said, “It’s leukemia. But I’m too upset to know what kind.”
Life comes at you fast without regard for your plans. Just ask Rohini Harvey, who was diagnosed with colon cancer at age thirty-five when she had seven-month-old twins. Harvey, an internal medicine doctor, wrote about what happened to her after an unexpected diagnosis changed her life in her essay “C18.9: Malignant Neoplasm of Colon, Unspecified.” (Fall 2017 Intima).
Roles can change quickly during the human journey. One minute you are working as a physician and the next you are a cancer patient, attempting to explain leukemia to your seven-year-old child in a way that maintains a semblance of safety for her but doesn’t blindside her if you don’t survive your treatment.
I am certain of one thing. Difficulties arise for every sentient being on this earth. The crucible of our experiences has the potential to burn away the thin veil that separates us— which deludes us to see others as ‘them’ rather than as us. This awareness births compassion. Kim, who had experienced painful bone marrow biopsies, now tries to perform them on patients painlessly by slowly pulling back on the collection plunger. And I cannot forget the suffering of the beagles.
Susan Schuerman Murphy is an attorney who defended healthcare providers when they were sued in Texas. The author has published medical jurisprudence articles and a book. Now she prefers to write creatively. The author lives near Ann Arbor, MI.