Swiss Miss
Meredith Baker had always wanted to see the Matterhorn, but growing up in a 20’x70’ double-wide near the interstate just south of Parkers Crossroads, Tennessee pretty much put an end to those dreams. The stage IV melanoma wasn’t helping, either. The Swiss Alps were high and unattainable, and she was at her lowest.
The irony of ironies, she thought, as she walked down the jetway into Terminal 2. The bone pain in her neck was intense, the kind of cancer pain that narcotics can’t touch.
Meredith thought a lot about her mama during the flights from Raleigh-Durham into Zürich, Switzerland. She was the “Sara” of Sara’s Diner out by I-40, never home to make Meredith feel safe, and always succumbing to promises of protection and love from truck drivers who would disappear with their meager savings. Sara was gullible. And ignorant, too.
Even as a child, Meredith had a constellation of moles tracking across her left cheek and down her neck onto her upper back. By the time she first kissed Boone Rhyne at age 17 in the double-wide after a meal of Wendy’s Baconators (his clumsy hands still greasy on her face), three of those moles were changing size and shape and leaking bits of blood every so often. And all that time, her mama never once said a word about them.
A short man with stylish European glasses appeared just inside the terminal, holding a small sign printed with Meredith’s last name. He has kind eyes, she thought.
“Hallo, Fräulein Baker, I am Kai, and I am here to take you to your appointment today, and to help you in any manner you might be needing.” She nodded shyly to Kai and adjusted her wig, sending another lance of pain down her spinal column.
The wig was a blond, curly number donated by her local chapter of the American Cancer Society, after a board member broke down on the highway near Sara’s one afternoon and noticed Meredith wiping the counter, bald and thin and pale and about to give up on chemotherapy. Meredith was not at all vain, but it’s strange what even a few blond curls on a shitty day in January can do when you have untold amounts of toxic poison snaking its way around your circulatory system.
And now here she was, all the way in Switzerland, so close to her Alpine dream, but here for a different reason. They cruised away from the airport in Kai’s Audi.
“Will it hurt at all?” she suddenly asked. “I mean, I know it’s not supposed to, they explained that over the phone, but I guess I’m just curious again.”
Kai looked over at her in the passenger seat with his kind eyes. “No, not at all. We will ensure it does not hurt. There will be no pain.”
Well that’s good, she thought. She had been through so many treatments, so many procedures, so many surgeries. She thought about the treatment that made all her fingers and toes go completely numb. About the clinical trial from which she had to withdraw because almost all her white blood cells disappeared. About the therapies that made her hair fall out, but caused her eyelashes to grow so long her cousin Kayla had to trim them with the bathroom scissors. All such terrible, sometimes irreversible effects that made her search for something different, something better—something she found here in Zürich.
As soon as Kai parked outside the blue-tinted building, Meredith knew she’d made the right choice. It just felt right. It felt… professional. Kai and Meredith entered the building, and a young woman wearing light blue scrubs appeared at her side with a wheelchair.
Meredith bristled.
“A common courtesy,” the young woman explained gently, “for our patients. Often it is more comfortable, for it is a small walk to your room.”
Meredith exhaled. There was dignity in this gesture, waiting for her to arrive inside the building. Behind closed doors.
Before she flew to Switzerland, she contacted Boone to say goodbye. They hadn’t dated or even talked in 2 ½ years, but she had a sudden desire to talk to him before she left. They met at Sara’s for pie and coffee after his shift over at Natchez Trace State Park. His eyes darted back and forth between her and the other women in the diner, and she shivered with the cold of not having any meat on her bones. He knew she was fighting cancer, but he didn’t ask about it. She took two tiny bites of her cherry pie before she watched him climb back into his state-owned F-150, and then she started to cry for the first time since she broke her wrist in the 4th grade. She instinctively glanced around for her mama, who took one look at her daughter’s face and said, “Get on home with you, you’re annoying my customers.”
So she did. And instead of the truck-driving scoundrels disappearing deep into America’s heartland with Sara’s money, this time it was Meredith who fled across the Atlantic Ocean with all of her mama’s hidden cash.
As they arrived at her room, Meredith noticed an older woman standing nearby who smiled. “Welcome, Meredith, I’m Dr. Retter, we spoke on the phone. I’ll be the one giving you your medication later today.”
She liked how they said her name, with a soft “r.” No one had ever made her feel soft before. She was the hard mountain girl, the tough little nothing from a nothing little town of less than 500 people who was a solid wall and let people crash right off of her. These people were letting her be… absorbent.
Dr. Retter followed them into her room and said, “Is there anything we can get you? Or do you just want to settle in?”
Meredith shook her head and answered, “No, thanks. I think I’ll just stay here before I get my medication at 4PM. That’s when I get it, right?”
Dr. Retter smiled and nodded, and gestured to the window. “It’s starting to snow, so if you want to feel a real Swiss snowfall, just let Kai know.”
Meredith pictured Tennessee snow along the interstate outside Sara’s, dirty with diesel exhaust from the 18-wheelers. If her mama was in a good mood, she would bring home a slice of apple pie or leftover hush puppies from the diner, and she would boil some water and dump a packet of Swiss Miss hot chocolate into a chipped orange “Go Volunteers!” mug for Meredith to drink. Those were the good winter afternoons, when the trailer was filled with the smell of diner grease and the sound of a happy woman for company. But mostly Meredith was alone.
It was now 3:30PM, and Dr. Retter entered Meredith’s room. “I’m surprised you’re here alone. Most patients come here with a support system to be here with them for this.”
Meredith just shrugged, and the pain in her spine rampaged anew.
Dr. Retter put a steadying hand on Meredith’s shoulder and said, “Okay, well, let’s be sure we’re prepared. Have we signed all of the documents we need to sign?”
Meredith nodded.
“Did our IV team get you set up with an IV?“
Meredith nodded.
“And Meredith, you’re ready to go through with this medication?”
Again, Meredith nodded.
“Okay, if you’re sure, Meredith, we’ll give you something now to help prevent vomiting when you get your medication at 4PM.”
Dr. Retter snapped a syringe of metoclopromide to the infusion pump by Meredith’s chair, programmed it to infuse over 30 minutes, and started the pump. The anti-emetic slowly dripped into the IV line on the back of Meredith’s left hand. Meredith stared at the drip and thought, so in 30 minutes, a new chapter begins.
At 4PM, the pump beeped, its medication run dry, and Dr. Retter walked in and silenced the machine. She flushed the IV with a bit of saline, and unscrewed it and clamped it so both of Meredith’s hands were once again free.
“Are you ready, Meredith?”
Meredith nodded.
“Ok, then. Let’s proceed. Are you comfortable?”
Meredith nodded.
Dr. Retter handed her a small white plastic cup of what looked like plain tap water. She sniffed at it.
“What is this again?” Meredith asked. It smelled off to her.
“I have to give it to you for you to drink yourself,” Dr. Retter answered. “I can’t actually give the cup to you to drink from my own hands. But to answer your question, it’s tap water, but mixed with sodium pentobarbital.”
Meredith nodded. Yes, she remembered this part in the research she did back in Tennessee and the documents she signed earlier today. She looked up past Dr. Retter at the logo on the wall in the hallway that read: DIGNITAS—To live with dignity, to die with dignity.
Meredith nodded. She drank the few ounces of liquid and put the cup down on her table. It tasted extremely bitter in her mouth. Dr. Retter leaned across the table, and as if by magic, produced a bar of Swiss chocolate. “For the aftertaste,” she said. Meredith took the bar and, breaking off a square and popping it into her mouth, thought that this was far better than any Swiss Miss she had ever tasted back in Tennessee.
After a minute or two, she lay back in her chair and closed her eyes, ready to relinquish. As Kai had promised, there was no pain.
She opened her eyes, for she sensed her mama nearby. She looked up into the brightest sky she had ever seen, and was astonished to see her mama standing at the very top of the Matterhorn, waving to her. She started climbing the icy hills toward her.
“Mama! ... Mama, I’m scared.”
Ken McCluskey is an editor and an RN. He lives and works outside of Philadelphia, PA, but is actively looking for his forever home.