RESTORATION | Robert McEachern
I got my second cancer diagnosis right about the time I finished restoring Cousin Oggie’s tea wagon.
The first diagnosis came about fourteen years earlier: follicular lymphoma. It’s an indolent blood cancer, one that is often slow-growing but considered incurable. I was forty years old at the time, about twenty years younger than the typical age for an FL diagnosis. After four weeks of oncologist appointments, blood tests, scans, a bone marrow biopsy, and a second opinion from a specialist, it was determined that my lymphoma was indeed the indolent variety. I was told to “watch and wait,” meaning the cancer was slow-growing enough that I didn’t need treatment right away. With no cure and limited treatment options, waiting for as long as possible can be a smart move. In fact, I watched and waited for two full years before I needed treatment, when swollen inguinal lymph nodes caused lymphedema in my left leg.
***
Cousin Oggie’s tea wagon was legendary, in the sense that I had been hearing about it for years but had never seen it. Ogarita was my wife’s father’s cousin, or maybe her mother’s cousin. It depended on who in the family you asked. But Ogarita was definitely the one who introduced my wife’s parents to one another. When Ogarita died, my wife’s family inherited several pieces of her furniture:: Cousin Oggie’s sideboard. Cousin Oggie’s rocker. Cousin Oggie’s tea wagon.
I was intrigued by the tea wagon, partly because in our thirty years of marriage, I had never seen it, since it was broken and tucked away in the garage, and partly because the idea of a tea wagon was foreign to me. My Scottish and Italian immigrant family members just put mugs of tea on the table, rather than wheeling a full tea set in from the kitchen, as was done by my wife’s second cousin twice removed, a Southern belle relocated from Memphis to Washington, DC.
***
I became interested in furniture restoration during the Covid-19 pandemic, taking solace in comfort viewing online and watching videos of antique and vintage wooden furniture restoration. I had a rotation of about a dozen restorers from the U.S. and Canada, Latvia and Turkey and I would eagerly await their weekly videos. I loved to watch the process of scraping away a failing finish, sanding wood to near-new smoothness, coloring it with stain to highlight the beautiful grain of the cherry, mahogany or walnut, and finishing it with lacquer, shellac or wax to make it shine. Most of all, I loved the before and after shots to see the change. It was a time when we all wanted to believe in restoration: in bringing something back to what it used to be.
I tried my hand at restoration with beat-up pieces rescued from the neighborhood on trash day. People were home, and bored, and cleaned out their attics and garages for something to do, and their cast-offs fed my new hobby. I had basic skills from painting houses every summer in high school. My early attempts went well.
I found out pretty quickly, though, that true restoration is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Over the course of restoring a dozen or so end tables, chests, and statement chairs, it became clear to me that the best I could do was renovation, not restoration: making something new again, not making it what it used to be. I could fashion a tribute to what it once was.
***
I spent the two years after my follicular lymphoma diagnosis learning why “watching and waiting” is sometimes called “watching and worrying.” It goes by other names, too, like “active surveillance” and “observation,” but those don’t capture the emotional toll it takes. Every bruise, every bump, every late spring night that’s just a little too warm: they all call up a list of symptoms in the watcher’s brain waiting to be checked off. We expect the cancer to arrive at some point. Waiting always has an object. Fear is one of the two dominant emotional side effects of holding off treatment.
The other is guilt. I found an online support group for patients with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the catch-all term for a collection of up to eighty different blood cancers ranging from indolent follicular lymphoma like mine to Burkett’s lymphoma, which can be so aggressive that tumors can double in size in twenty-four hours. Despite having wildly different diseases somehow grouped under the same name, those of us in the support group bonded over the common experience of being told we had cancer.
But the differences in our diagnoses did pop up and cause problems, usually when someone who was having a bad day encountered someone else who was having a worse day, and looked for someone to blame, helped by the distance and anonymity of being online. “You indolent folks have it easy,” someone with an aggressive lymphoma would say. “You can go years without treatment, while I have to watch my hair fall out and wonder when I’ll get the feeling in my fingers back.” Someone would respond, “You call this easy? My slow-growing cancer is incurable. I’ll always live with it. You can be treated and cured and move on with your life.” Et cetera.
I stayed out of the fights. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and make their days worse. But mostly it was the guilt that kept me silent. I was still going to work every day. I looked and felt okay. I’d see my oncologist every three months, who would tell me my bloodwork was “rock solid.” What could I possibly say to someone ravaged by chemotherapy or radiation that would come off in any way empathetic?
Even after two years, when I finally did receive treatment, it was a monoclonal antibody, a relatively less aggressive treatment than the traditional Big Three of chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery. The long-term side effects are problematic, including the predilection for skin cancer. But short-term, I felt like I really did have it easy. I did treatment on Fridays, slept through the weekend, and was back to work on Mondays.
A cancer-survivor friend once teased me, as only another cancer survivor can: “You still haven’t had chemo? Can’t you even get a real cancer?”
I couldn’t help but ask myself that same question sometimes.
***
We were visiting my wife’s family when I finally asked my sister-in-law, the family archivist, about Cousin Oggie’s tea wagon. She told me it was in the garage, but that the garage was unsafe due to cracks in the mortar from a freak earthquake ten years before. I took my chances and retrieved the pieces of the tea wagon and put them in the trunk of the car with our suitcases.
The damage was repairable, but it was the most delicate object I’d ever worked on. There was no maker’s mark, though a little research had me guessing that it was made in the late 1940s, when tea wagons, popular before Prohibition, made a comeback among post-war women looking to make a happy home for their families. I stripped the finish from the tea wagon, carefully scraping and sanding, and discovered it was made from four different types of wood. In the factory, it had been finished with toned lacquer, covering the wood in dark brown to even out the color variations. I opted for gel stain to do more or less the same thing, helping to cover up my many repairs of the cracks, splits and missing chunks that were inevitable for a piece of furniture in a house with nine children.
My wife cried when she saw it finished. “It’s exactly like when we got it from Cousin Oggie when I was a kid!”
But I knew it wasn’t a true restoration. You can’t really bring back what once was.
***
A week later, I got my second cancer diagnosis.
It was not a surprise. My oncologist had encouraged me to see a dermatologist regularly. I had a combination of factors that increased my chances of skin cancer: my easily sunburned skin (from the Scottish side, apparently, not the Italian side), my previous cancer of the immune system, and treatment with an immunotherapy. So the scaly patch on my scalp, which wouldn’t go away no matter how much I moisturized it, turned out to be squamous cell carcinoma.
It was removed with Mohs surgery, a process that can take several hours in an outpatient clinic as the surgeon removes thin layers of the cancerous area and then examines them under a microscope until a layer is removed that is cancer-free.
I was awake for the procedure, sitting up. The surgeon and I chatted about our shared interest in Scotch whisky and travel. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but it was easy to imagine what was happening. I could feel the cutting and scraping in my bones, like metal shaving wood.
I sat in the waiting room for an hour as they stained and examined and analyzed the layers of my skin. Cancer has a way of bringing clarity, or what seems at the time like clarity. And so I thought to myself, “Still no chemo or radiation. But this counts as surgery. Finally, one of the Big Three treatments. Maybe I’m a real cancer patient after all.”
***
Furniture restoration is about adding and taking away. Old varnish and stain are scraped, sanded, burned off with chemicals. Missing wood is carefully replaced. Colors are matched and masked. An expert restorer can make repairs that are virtually imperceptible. The rest of us amateurs fool ourselves into thinking the repairs look OK. But restoration is a misnomer. Even just a few replaced planks on Theseus’ ship call its authenticity into question.
Cancer is the same way. Things are added and things are taken away. A few slices of flesh are removed, covered up by skin that is stretched and stitched. And with those slices, a little bit of fear is removed, at least temporarily, until the next scaly patch arrives, or the next lymph node swells.
And a little guilt is cut away, too. But just a thin layer.
Robert McEachern is a cancer advocate and writer. His work has appeared in JCO Oncology Practice, KevinMD, Blood-Cancer.org, Lymphoma News Today, Lyfebulb, The Mighty and CURE Today.