In my foolish pre-cancer days, I pretty much covered up my ears when I heard about someone’s chemo treatment. That said, I’m not a complete jerk; my heart twinged, especially for parents of young children, and I offered sympathy, meals, a compassionate ear. But in some profoundly hidden place in my thinking, I tried to pretend that my garden squash and chard and those miles of walking would inoculate me. More likely, I was too cowardly to consider a possibility that hadn’t arrived.

This morning, I texted an acquaintance, I’ve now met the Red Devil, too. Looking forward to a long conversation over coffee this spring about your experience.

Yesterday, morning sunlight filled this Dartmouth-Hitchcock infusion room. Nuthatches and chickadees and juncos flitted around birdfeeders. Two wooden reindeer were linked by a red ribbon.

Without a port, the poison/healing infusion flowed into my vein. Remembering clearly my breathless and rigors! reaction to the rituximab, I burbled my fears to the nurse, who sought consult. She told me she only had good experiences with patients; I assured her I am a striving A+ patient. Then she worked her mojo and set up some black case that was never opened, assured me the nurses’ station was actually all of five feet where I was sitting, and then, drip, drip, drip, she released the poison that presumably will save my life into my vein. She stood talking to me and my daughter about the merits of studded snow tires and a recipe for gingerbread cookies, and then showed me that I was twenty minutes along with the rituximab. All was well.

Here’s the thing: there is no ease or comfort in this cancerland. The nurse is gowned and double-gloved to protect herself against these chemicals. I’ve read my chart thoroughly and know that innocuous word complications could rapidly spin my life into a dire Shackleton sea. And yet, in the warm rare-in-December sunlight, with my daughter and her stack of Christmas cards, my knitting, a novel I’d plucked from my shelf that I’d wanted to read, those downy birds flickering — a calm outside time’s relentlessness.

As for the Red Devil (the crimson of young Lucy’s magic potion in the Narnia books), the nurse injected a long fat vial into my arm. During this, she had me eat sherbet, pressing the icy substance against the roof of my mouth as the Red Devil would seek the tender places in my body and could erupt mouth sores. My daughter held the cup as I dug into the frozen substance. The nurse pushed the liquid slowly into arm, careful, careful not to burst the vein. The infusion would burn and destroy my arm, one of the nightmarish complications which would plague me for months, maybe years, to come. At the end, this confident nurse set down the empty vial and breathed deeply.

I thanked this woman for her steady hands.

Much later, 90 miles north by interstate and state roads, my daughter and her partner hold my hands as we walk up the path into my house. If I stumbled, I imagined them holding me between the two of them.

On the doorstep, my potter friend left a package with handmade yellow candles and a flower candle holder and a mug glazed the blue hues of the midsummer sky. So many happy days my kids spent in her studio — Mud Club, Clay Camp — and the cups of tea we’ve shared as mothers and crafters. A gift of light.