Last Monday night I spent the night at the Hershey Medical Center. Please understand, this is far from the only night I’ve slept there, but it is the first night I was a patient and not just sleeping on the floor next to my wife. It was an…odd experience; I’m not used to being ill, so I make a really lousy patient, and my current complaint is such that I tend to be a little cranky at the best of times, and sleeping in a hospital is far from the best of times.

But it isn’t Monday or the testing that’s on my mind, but rather Tuesday morning. I was discharged early, so early in fact Cafe Soleil wasn’t yet open (but was getting there). It was a truly bitter-sweet visit, since I knew it would be the last.

Monday evening, when entering the hospital (uncommonly I entered via the “main” lobby next to the er) I saw the brand-spankin-new Starbucks they plopped right in the lobby itself; a place for quiet introspection will become, starting next Monday, yet another annoyingly loud place for crass commerce. Then when passing Cafe Soliel that evening (unable to enjoy anything, what with my firm limits on intake before the tests) I saw that small, sad little handwritten sign, thanking the patrons for their friendships, and noting their last day would be Friday.

Yep, the big guys come in with the bucks, and chase out the indi’s. What’s amusing is that the indi in question used to be a Seattle’s Best, back in the days before Starbucks bought them out and turned them into…well…Starbucks. But back in 1998, that little tiny stand near the vending machines with the pleasant staff and excellent coffee kept me going…while my wife was receiving chemotherapy, and my prematurely-harvested daughter lay in the NICU up on seven, I always knew I could run downstairs and grab a cappuchino (extra shot, thanks) and a smile, and for just a few moments not feel like my entire life was falling apart.

Even in the intervening years, every time we had an appointment with the oncologist (initially frequent, growing less-so over the years as the liklihood of recurrence diminishes) I always made it a point to walk the corridor between UPC and the main hospital, take the south elevators down, and hit the rotunda for a cup of coffee at the place that helped keep me sane at a time nothing else in the world made sense.

So as I picked up my coffee Tuesday morning, knowing I wouldn’t be back before this little tiny shop composed of cubes on wheels was dismantled, I was a little sad. Change isn’t always good…and just as a note to anyone who is relatively new to the blog, when I was in Seattle last year, the only lousy cup of coffee I had for my entire stay was a bitter iced coffee at the Starbucks in the Seattle Center, so don’t ask me to appreciate the robotic nonsense served up by this huge corporate giant. I’m going to forever miss that little shop in the corridor, across from the men’s room, where I got an all-too-brief respite from the terrors of having the rest of my family admitted under medical care. And in honor of that, I’ll find another independent coffee shop somewhere around the Medical Center, and stop there for my cappuchino after the next appointment instead.

As I carried out my coffee, I was already feeling a bit maudlin, but when I left the building I was forcefully struck with a deja vu so powerful as to be painful…the time of day was almost precisely the same as the many mornings Annie and I entered the building for her radiation treatments, when I would help my still-pregnant wife out of the trunk and into the building after the ~50-minute drive from home, where she would hang from a Rube Goldberg-esque device devised by the radiologists so her tumor received the massive radiation dose and not our still-resting child-to-be. The slight haze, the smell of grass and flowers, the sameness of the angle of the sun all conspired to take my breath away in a sudden rememberance, already fueled by the death of “my” coffee shop and the memories it dredged. I had to physically shake my head to remove the feelings of horror and dread; I had to force myself to remember that after all the terror, my wife is healthy and wonderful, my daughter a wise-beyond-her-years seven-year-old with hair of flame, eyes of ice, and a smile to melt the hardest heart.

I had to remember that this silly little illness from which I suffer is nothing…beat the big ones, cancer, prematurity, and this nonsense is nothing but an inconvenience. I may have lost a large part of the summer, but my family has many, many more summers ahead of it to enjoy…and it was that thought that took me out of the parking lot, sipping a perfect cappuchino, and pushed me down the road…toward home.