We Eat Bagels Before Cancer Treatment. Here’s Why.

“Should we have bagels before or after your treatment?”

We are headed for the cancer center, a red brick building in the middle of Manhattan. On the days my husband has his immunotherapy infusions, we usually eat at a nearby bagel shop, a way of making a not-fun day a little more pleasant. I can’t remember the restaurant’s real name, even though it is emblazoned on a plaque above the door. Norman and I call it the Hope Bagel Shop because we go there hoping that one day, when this cancer experience is but a faint memory, we won’t need to be anywhere around this area ever again.

His treatment is aimed at forever vanquishing the tumor which had unceremoniously invaded his bladder twenty months ago. So far, it has successfully destroyed any remaining errant cells, invisible dybbuks, tinier than the sesame seeds encrusted on my favorite bagel, which could hypothetically proliferate and cause major trouble down the road. And what a road it would be, a winding pathway filled with questions, answers we don’t always like, financial worries, and decisions, always more decisions.

“Let’s go before,” he says. And so, we do.

The Little Decisions Become the Easy Ones

Less than an hour later, he will be lying flat, wearing only a blue and white gown, opened to the front. A slender catheter (feeling as big as a tree) will be inserted into a place on his body where no one wants anything to be inserted.

Because he must suffer the indignity and discomfort of this procedure, I always let him choose where and when we will eat, even if I’m totally dying for a burger or something other than a bagel. Oops, nothing about dying should appear in a story about cancer, even though it’s difficult for me to exclude the idea completely. Having grown up in the 1950s, cancer and death have always been inextricably linked in my mind.

Food decisions are the easy ones. We’ve had many more difficult things to decide about since his diagnosis. After Dr. Google gave us a crash course in “Everything You Never Wanted to Know about Bladder Cancer,” we had to research and select a medical institution, choose an oncologist and a surgeon, and decide between several types of treatments. Other small and not-so-small decisions needed to be made, all in the service of fighting a disease that, while not the worst type of cancer (is there a best kind?) could potentially kill him.

Sometimes It’s Easier to Talk About Bagels

Does it perhaps strike you as bizarre that I’m writing about cancer and bagels in the same essay?

It’s much easier to talk about food than it is to talk about terror, about persistent nightmares that make restful, rejuvenating sleep impossible. Sometimes, lying awake in the pre-dawn hours, I wonder what it would be like to wake up alone in our bed. I want my husband to live forever, to keep doing the things he does that used to annoy me so much – leaving crusted, Metamucil-scented drinking glasses on our kitchen counter, recycling the Sunday paper before I’ve read all the sections, dropping his dirty socks on the floor only inches away from the laundry hamper.

Cancer does tend to make you rethink your priorities.

Finding Life in the Cancer Center

As usual, the bagel shop is bustling with medical workers, garbed in green scrubs, who have run out for a quick bite between patients. There is music, barely audible, in the background.

Hubby loves crusty pumpernickel bagels oozing with strawberry cream cheese, which he washes down with a wellness-boosting cup of green tea. My toasted bagel, slathered with lavender-tinted blueberry-flavored cream cheese, is accompanied by a foam-topped cappuccino, not that I need caffeine on an already anxiety-producing day.

Sated, we enter the hospital annex, where the lobby is filled with individuals of all ages, colors, sizes, and shapes. Some are patients, and others are friends, family, or caregivers. It is often difficult to guess what category someone fits into, although I assume that the skinny, frail-looking ones, especially those with scarves or hats covering hairless heads, are patients. Some more robust individuals look as if they belong on tennis courts instead of in a cancer center. My 82-year-old husband looks as if he should be playing pickleball.

No one in this huge, multi-story building filled with cancer patients is dead.

Yes, sadly, some of the people will die in six weeks, six months, or six years, but many will live longer. According to the 75th annual Cancer Statistics report by the American Cancer Society, cancer in general is becoming less of a death sentence and more of a treatable chronic disease. Many people die of something completely unrelated, including old age.

A pianist is playing lively music in the lobby, and a chubby toddler is whirling around, eyes bright as the evening stars. When the performance is done, there is scattered applause, and, for a moment, you can hear the sounds of silence, quickly broken by a raspy loudspeaker announcement.

I have heard that music stopping can be seen as a metaphor for death. The reality is that none of us can ever know when our music will stop.

Looking Toward the Next Chapter

On the upper floors of the cancer center, sometimes you can hear the melodious sound of a bell being rung. This ritual signifies that someone has completed treatment and is starting their next chapter, hopefully living happily-ever-after, just like in the fairy tales we loved as children.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” asks American poet Mary Oliver in her magnificent poem “The Summer Day.”

Living each day to its fullest is essential. We are grateful that my husband feels well enough to enjoy the small, simple pleasures in our precious life — weekends at the pool, binge-watching Netflix, bridge games with his buddies, and always, always, our meals at the Hope Bagel Shop.

We look forward to the day when it is finally his turn to ring the bell, the chimes marking the next leg of his journey towards renewed health. At that time, we will, happily, need to find a new bagel place closer to home.

For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don't forget to subscribe to CURE®'s newsletters here.