The Juice Glass Solution

It all started with the juice glass. Small really is beautiful.

My wife Brenda is a clinical dietitian, with years of education in the science of nutrition and decades of experience teaching sick people how to eat their way to better health, and here I was half-asleep on a couch within sight of her kitchen, starving myself to death.

I had tried my best to project strength and determination to my family, doctors and nurses during my first three-week hospitalization for chemo treatments, and I emerged with my leukemia in retreat. Everything else was a mess.

I was sleep-deprived and constipated, hairless and weak. My fingers and feet were numb from nerve damage. Worse by far, I was in withdrawal, not myself, my mind a lump of wet cardboard.

For that I had prednisone to thank. Prednisone is a steroid and a rogue warrior: apparently it messes with cancer; it definitely messes with you. When the doctors took me from a high dose to zero in one step at the end of my hospital stay, I collapsed like a bad lie.

First night home, my sister-in-law Ivy, visiting from Kansas to support Brenda, prepared her tarragon chicken, a dish we all loved. She’s a wonderful cook. I couldn’t touch it.

It was no different at breakfast the next morning, or lunch, and so on for days to follow. We had been warned I'd have trouble with my appetite, but I wasn’t even bothering to push the food around on my plate.

Soon I refused to come to the table, watching instead from the couch as my family ate and pretended that all was as it should be. It wasn't long before Brenda's persistent urging—you need to eat!—took on a tinge of alarm. That did little but annoy me. A week after my release, I returned for a checkup. The doctor could not mask her startled expression as she regarded me.

“Are you depressed?” she asked. 

I don’t know why the question surprised me, but I knew the answer.

“Yes.” 

She did what doctors do: prescribed a pill, which Brenda remembers as more prednisone, I as an antidepressant—whatever, it helped. So did pausing to look at myself in our big bathroom mirror one morning as I emerged from the shower. Who was this knob-kneed stick figure? Not me, I answered, fear rising and around it whispers of resolve. 

But try as I might, I could do little more than nibble. My next round of chemo was delayed, a compromise the doctors did not want to make, but I wasn’t ready.

I stood, I suppose, at a tipping point, and that's when Brenda’s persistence saved my life. My wife is a champion of all things in moderation, frugal and un-indulgent, Yankee to the core. So when she proposed making me a milkshake from Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, that got my attention. I didn’t even mind that she added an Ensure nutrient drink and two scoops of protein powder to my Chocolate Fudge Brownie before turning on the blender. She set her calorie-bomb concoction on the table next to the couch in a summery plastic glass. It was filled with foamy goodness. It looked so big. “I can’t,” I said. 

Brenda took it away, only to return moments later with a swallow’s worth in the bottom of a juice glass. Hmm. That I could manage, in slow sips—nice! Twenty minutes later, she brought another juice glass, filled a little higher, then another, and so on until the first milkshake was gone. Later that day, with the second shake, I graduated to a bigger cup, and before long the tipping point had tilted my way. 

In the midst of all the protocols and procedures, needles and nurses that constitute a fight with cancer, you still need a couple breaks if you are to prevail, someone or something there for you at a decisive moment. For many it is faith. For me it was the love of family, which in our household can be expressed far more meaningfully in deeds than in words. I have had no break bigger in life than Brenda, and none bigger in the moment than her Juice Glass Solution.

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