The Department of Lost & Found Read Online Free PDF

the policy I was crafting on my computer, not the people below whom the policy might actually affect.
    I hadn’t been back to the office in the month since my diagnosis. Although I’d practically begged the senator to let me keep working, she personally fielded a call from Dr. Chin, and when she explained my long hours and my incessant travel schedule (and, I assume, my insatiable appetite for the office), they both agreed that I should tone it down a notch (or two) while my body acclimated to the chemo. Even my mother agreed—my mom who once decided, back when I was eleven, that she wanted to run the New York marathon, just to test herself, to see how far her body could sustain the pain (and most likely insanity), and thus trained for all of five weeks, and managed to cross the finish line at just under four hours. So it wasn’t as if my mother’s sympathy chip was finely honed.
    My parents had driven up from Philly for my first round of chemo. “You don’t have to,” I’d told them on the phone, wiping away the snot that poured from my nostrils after succumbing to a The Department of Lost & Found
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    crying fit over Ned. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wailed so loudly; surely my neighbors thought that someone had died.
    But then I did remember it, of course. It was when Jake cut a wedge so deeply into my heart that I feared I’d never be able to successfully breathe, much less relish the life that comes along with that breath, again.
    But my parents arrived just three hours later, and my mom sat and squeezed my shoulder as I reclined in a blue recliner and watched General Hospital while liquid toxins filled my bloodstream. “That wasn’t so bad,” I told my mom in the cab ride home, and she rubbed my back and pulled my head to her shoulder, something she probably hadn’t done since I was about five.
    My parents stuck around through the weekend. Although Dr.
    Chin had warned me of the symptoms, sometimes words do little to warn you of the oncoming storm. Within a day, getting out of bed to pee seemed too big a task. To say that the fatigue felt as if I’d been plowed, flattened, pancaked by a Mack truck would be close to the truth. To say that the effort required to lift just my pinky or my little toe or even to crack open my eyelids felt Hercu-lean would also be accurate.
    And of course, the pesky part of dealing with the exhaustion is that within twenty-four hours, I was also battling nausea. So the little energy I did have in reserves was spent running back and forth to the bathroom with the threat of constant vomiting. Finally, my mother matter-of-factly placed a stainless-steel bowl, one that Ned and I had bought at Bed Bath & Beyond when we moved in together, at the right side of my bed. What had been purchased with the thought of spending lingering hours whipping up gourmet delicacies as a new cohabitating unit now served to receive the pure bile purged from my stomach; it wasn’t as if I had the appetite to eat anything to barf back up.
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    a l l i s o n w i n n s c o t c h
    Five days later, I slowly emerged from the cocoon of my first chemo treatment, and my parents checked out of the Waldorf, ready to return to their now semialtered lives. I was gingerly stepping out of the shower when they stopped over to say good-bye.
    “We’ll be back in a few weeks,” my dad said, ignoring my damp hair and pulling me into him, as I clung to the top of the towel rather than return his embrace. He kissed the top of my head, and I heard his voice crack.
    “I spoke with your boss,” my mom interrupted, as I pulled back from my father. “She’s agreed that it’s best if you work from home—
    or really, don’t work at all—for a few weeks or even months.”
    “What? Who gave you the right to do that? We’re headed into the election, I’m not taking any time off.” I walked into the bedroom to get dressed.
    “Natalie, this isn’t negotiable,” she said to my back.
    I slung on a sweatshirt