The sun is trying to come out over Northern California. A valiant, though faint, effort following a week of wicked storms. My father drove me to my third chemotherapy treatment in a downpour this past Tuesday. (I’ve learned the hospital calls these treatments “infusions.” I must get with the jargon here.)

It had to be a labor of love, my father’s driving through sheets of rain from his hometown fifteen miles away. Then, too, sitting and waiting through my four-hour infusion can’t have been fun. I would think, since he’s been through his own chemotherapy at the HMO we belong to, he’d run in the opposite direction. Actually, I think he likes to flirt with the nurses. He knows them all.

One of the oncology nurses is a neighbor of mine. I reminded her that, when she moved in across the street and told me of her profession, I said, “Ew,” and gave a little shudder. She nodded. “And now,” she said, “here we are.” Yes indeed, here we are.

“One day soon, this will all be a blip on the radar,” my nurse-neighbor told me before my first infusion in early December 2009. This week, my sister sent me a card with much the same sentiment. “One day soon, this will be a memory,” she wrote. One day . . . soon.

The memory plays interesting tricks. A friend told me how well she’d handled her own chemotherapy for breast cancer some years ago. Days later she confided that she’d been so weak at one juncture, she’d needed a blood transfusion. Ah yes, someday soon . . .

I know I make an impatient patient. But being in the middle of this cure for cancer is painful, sad, and all consuming. There is no way to dress it up. One day soon cannot come soon enough.