The puzzle

The waiting room of the radiation oncology clinic had a coffee table that was solely for the purpose of assembling jigsaw puzzles. When one puzzle was finished, then a new one would be selected from tall stack in the corner. I don’t know where the idea to have puzzles in the waiting room came from. Perhaps it was some psychologist somewhere. To be honest I don’t really care, I just know what those puzzles meant to me and to the other people who had to come in day after day.

The first week or so I mostly ignored the puzzles. I was more interested in reading the waiting room magazines. But magazines come out once a month and I was in that waiting room every day. I began helping put puzzles together. It was a very satisfying way to do puzzles. Sometimes I made lots of progress, sometimes only a piece or two, but I knew that by the next day when I came in I’d be able to look at the puzzle and see that someone else had finished a section. So day by day the puzzle would get completed. A finished puzzle would sit on the table for a full day so everyone had a chance to see it, then someone would clear it away and a new puzzle came out. Once I got to pick the new puzzle. 500 piece puzzles were best because they would last a little less than a week. 1000 piece puzzles were too big, the progress wasn’t as easy to measure from day to day.

As my world contracted and my concentration ebbed I was no longer interested in trying to focus my brain on reading. But I could sit on the floor and focus on making sense out of little pieces of color. Those puzzles became essential, soothing to me as the weeks progressed. I can still remember some of the pictures. I can even remember some of the individual pieces. I remember assembling the red roof of a white cottage. I remember a clump of purple flowers. I remember one afternoon that I assembled most of a sunlight forest background. I can remember these puzzles and pictures vividly, but I can’t remember the faces or names of the nurses and techs. The puzzles were a bright happy spot in a very unpleasant experience.

Sometimes others worked on the puzzles at the same time I did. Having the puzzle gave us a camaraderie, a point of identification beyond the fact that we were both in the office to be irradiated. I remember talking to people, sometimes even laughing. But I didn’t have to look at them or share more than I wanted to, because there was the puzzle. I am good at puzzles. It was so nice to have something I could accomplish, something I could still be good at when everything else was out of reach. I couldn’t focus to read, or to care for my children, or to eat, or cook, but I could still take loose pieces of color and make them into a beautiful picture. Not a day went by that I didn’t put at least one piece in the puzzle.

One time the puzzle was a 1000 piece drawing of some animals in a forest. It was about half completed. The puzzle had been a particularly difficult one because so many of the pieces were dark. I came in for therapy only to discover that someone, probably a child, had taken a huge section from the middle of the puzzle and crumbled it back into pieces. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. My small, measurable progress had been destroyed. I was angry at the thoughlessness of it. I wanted to cry. I did not want to sit down and start over. I didn’t work on the puzzle at all that day. I sat on a chair staring at it and trying not to cry. Somehow the puzzle became a symbol of the slog through radiation therapy. Peice by piece, day by day, we pulled things together and kept going. On the day the puzzle was destroyed I spent alot of time feeling hopeless. My measurable progress was gone and the days until the end seemed to stretch forever before me. I was not the only one to feel that way. Several people expressed opinions similar to mine. Even the people who didn’t actually put the puzzle together enjoyed watching the progress. The mood in the waiting room was bleak that day.

Fortunately Howard was with me that day. He also enjoys puzzles. He went right to work putting it right. He worked the whole time I was being irradiated and by the time I came back the puzzle was almost back to where it had been before. That made the world right again and I was able to work on it again the next day. I think that might have been the puzzle that I got to put away. We finished it a few days later, it sat whole for a day, then I put it away and selected a smaller, brighter puzzle.

I sometimes think about my reaction to the destruction of the puzzle. On the scale of important things, puzzles don’t rank very high. Who was the person who destroyed it? Did they even realize the damage that was done? As a mother of young children I know how they can get into things quickly, so I imagine that is what happened. It amazes me that my world became so small, so constricted that such a small incident looms large in my memory.

I continued to do lots of jigsaw puzzles during my recouperation period. They continued to be enjoyable and soothing. Puzzles continue to be a soothing friend for me even though I don’t currently have time for them. I’m very glad to be capable of doing many other things besides puzzles and so I’m glad to not have time for them. They’ll be there for me if I need them again.