NakedSunfish.com - Spontaneous and Sporadic

Pump(s) and Circumstance
(Previously published in Issue 109)

by
Rick Brown

“You’re gonna hafta name it.” I heard the young nurse quip.

She was busy plugging my chemo pump into the port in my chest … then securing it around my waist with what she described as a kind of “fanny pack”.

I glanced down and saw what looked to me like a vintage 1980s Walkman carrier with a contraption … about the same size and almost as clumsy as my boyhood Philco transistor radio, encased within. I assumed my new pump would not give me the pleasure baseball had on the old silver and red Philco of my youth.

“Name it?” I replied quietly … my voice tinged slightly with consternation.

“Oh yes. All the chemo patients name their pump.” She added brightly … as if it were a new grade school homeroom hamster.

I thought this either a bit macabre … OR … really … really … well … trite. Yet I allowed her instructions to float in my mind as perhaps the cancer center’s optimism policy. I mean … what exactly do I name a bi-weekly, uncomfortable chemo pump pushing poison through my veins? I certainly want to remain positive … and considering how lucky I’ve been in my misfortune … I thought … Bill? Jerry? Agnes?

My creative brain cells began their processing … albeit clumsily … thanks to a drug aptly called FU-5 (no shit) … pulsing in my inner personal plumbing. The first notion in my noggin came to me: The Village Pump … a funky bar/eatery on the south shore of Kelley’s Island in Lake Erie. Now this is a very fine establishment … and I do have a viable history with the joint. But it’s hardly a name for a chemo pump.

I continued erratically mulling it over while my wife Yvonne chauffeured my recovering body home. It’s not easy attempting lucidity after chemotherapy. The fatigue is in charge. Nonetheless, I easily turned my thoughts to one of my favorite 3 Stooges shorts “Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise”. In it, the boys try to fix a pump on the Widow Jenkins’s farm to repay her for making them an elaborate supper. Despite some clever wordplay by Curly regarding a crowbar … the broken pump is never given a name. And no offense to Misters Howard and Fine, but I really do not want to be hooked up every other week to a chemo pump named Curly, Larry or especially … MOE!

Once back at our bungalow I briefly considered, “Philco’. Yet it seemed a shame to tarnish those solidly sacred transistor radio’s collective memories. The Cleveland baseball club may have been terrible in the early 60s but that never shook my love for the game or provincial loyalties. I listened intently … snuggled under my bed covers nearly every night during baseball season.

Then … after giving in to fatigue by dropping my boney body on the loveseat … I flashed back to a distant … yet integral to my childhood … past personal relationship with a real wheezing, squeaking, laborious contraption:

The Silly Pump.

I grew up in a working class … poor … family of six: 2 brothers, a sister and my parents. Being the oldest afforded me some special treatment … still … somewhat negotiable in a lower income household. Poor families … at least in the late 1950s … took drives in the car for entertainment. Gas was, after all, 30 cents a gallon … dirt cheap even at the time. And I know this is difficult to imagine … but there was no interstate highway system yet … at least not around the small town/rural areas of Northeast Ohio. So, the Browns meandered the 2-lane state highways gleefully in their 1953 Ford Customline.

Without limited access freeways, Rest Areas were few and far between. They were nothing like today. I knew them as Roadside Rests, consisting of a grove of trees with picnic tables scattered throughout their shading branches. To the back of this area was a very basic cabin-like structure housing pit toilets. An outhouse as interpreted by Ohio’s Department of Transportation. And it smelled like you’d think it would.

But up close to the road set a small, roofed only … structure that sheltered a well water pump. A gloriously green pump that screeched “WEEEEE … HEEEE!!! WEEEEEEE …. HEEEEE” while my father furiously worked to provide H2O as the family waited to quench our thirst. How joyous the sight of cool, clear, clean well water erupting out of this unapologetically fiercely green, squealing contraption my father so fervently toiled at, was for me as a boy. And how delicious this magical moment … so much so that in my obviously limited, childish vocabulary I proclaimed it to be THE Silly Pump.

Eventually the moniker took on a myriad of meanings. My dad grew weary of priming the pump alone. He began the pumping until it was almost, say, 75% ready to deliver its good. Then he would yell out, “You boys finish the job! I’m too exhausted!” My two brothers and I would then … either en masse … or sometimes individually … bring the pump to fruition.

But again … this early memory is too life affirming to name a chemo device designed to fill a person full of poison after … regardless of long-term success.

Two or three treatments down the line I had an epiphany.

Since Yvonne and I decided to stay in Florida for the duration of chemotherapy, why not name my bi-weekly pump something specifically Floridian. After all, wasn’t this state where the

Spanish Conquistadors came seeking wealth and fame? Didn’t one famously believe somewhere in the Sunshine State was The Fountain of Youth? And are not fountains simply pumps preening and presenting themselves as pretty? Ponce de Leon probably thought so.

Consequently, I solved my dilemma by naming my contraption PUMPS DE LEON. I know it is not a Fountain of Youth. But I have to believe that despite the powerful poison of FU-5 … this process will … in the end … give life back into the body of a man … who as a boy … celebrated The Silly Pump.

I haven’t seen the nurse who told me to name my pump again. No other patient has told me their pump’s “names” …. or if they have a name at all. Yet I think my history with these contraptions points me down the positive road … a journey of discovery, life affirming wonder … all from a simple pump …

… sometimes silly

… sometimes seriously so.

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