This Machine Killed Cancer

Hi everybody.  I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been too sick and depressed to write much.  Fortunately, Rebekah has done a wonderful job carrying on with updates to let you know how I’m doing.  I still don’t have much to say, but I couldn’t let this little gem go without sharing:

Every time I get chemo or have a serious procedure done, two nurses have to verify my identity.  One of them reads my name, hospital number, and birth date off of my wristband while the other checks the info against the orders they have.  This is pretty commonplace and was repeated once again as I was about to have my stem cells extracted for the bone marrow transplant.  The middle-aged male nurse was reading off my information to the kind Chinese nurse he was working with.  He read off my hospital number and date of birth without incident, but when he got to my name, his partner seemed to have some trouble.

“Read it again, please,” she asked.

“Shayne. S-H-A-Y-N-E.  Is there a problem,” the male nurse responded.

The Chinese nurse paused, shook her head and said, “Hmm…so many letters for only one sound.”

There usually isn’t much confusion about my first name other than the occasional mispronunciation - how someone can look at my pasty white skin and decide that I’ve been named “Cheyenne” like the Indian tribe is beyond me. However, if you really want to screw with the hospital staff, your insurance company, your bank, the DMV, and social security, try changing your last name part way through a cancer treatment.  When Rebekah and I got married last winter, we decided that it was unfair to expect either of us to change our last name without both of us doing so.  So, we opted to create a portmanteau out of our names, combining Meek and O’Neill to make “Miel.”  It is a lovely coincidence that this word means “honey” in French and Spanish.  I don’t know if it’s because we live in the South, or if it’s just that rare, but people seem to have a hard time with the idea that a guy would change his last name when he got married.  Add in the complication that the name didn’t exist for either one of us before the wedding and you can literally watch people’s mental circuits fry as they try to understand.  One hospital administrator was so convinced that there was a dash somewhere in our new name (as if we were actually saying “Meek-O’Neill” so quickly that it came out “Miel”) that she asked us three times where to place the dash.  Eventually she had to write down Rebekah’s explanation word for word to file in our report.  For the sake of awesomeness, I will repeat her explanation here.  ”We basically dropped a few letters and smushed the rest together.” 

I love that the word “smushed” is somewhere in my official hospital records.