This morning, my father complained of a sore throat, which in normal circumstances is a simple nuisance, one that takes his normal baritone into an absolute bass, but my mother had her Day 1 chemotherapy yesterday, six hours of three caustic poisons, a dose so strong and terrible that even her doctor, one of the top sarcoma specialists in the country, acknowledges the devastation of this cocktail, because they do not know what to do with a woman who has a cancer that only appears in children. They do not tell us that she is one of four hundred reported cases in the last thirty years. This Day 1 infusion, the first of her three-week cycle, means that her white blood cells will fizzle into oblivion and she'll lose all ability to fight infection.
     By afternoon, my father was in bed and my nerves tensed until I could hear them in my own ears. My mother has been coughing lately too, but the CT scan she had two days ago to check the spread of cancer came back with crystal-clear lungs.
     The sound of their coughing terrifies me. For the first time since my mother's doctor said cancer, I am truly afraid, down to my bones, in a way I was not afraid during her surgery, when she started chemotherapy, or when she was unable to get out of bed for days. We are three months into her treatment and the fear chokes me.

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Infusion: four cups of water, 2-3” knob of ginger, sliced thin, 1/4 cup honey, 2 T fresh lemon juice. Bring to a simmer, add ingredients, turn off heat, cover, and let steep for fifteen minutes, or however long it takes to get the strength you like. I like to steep for closer to half an hour. Doing this in Penelope Pumpkin, my beloved 2 qt. pumpkin-shaped Le Creuset cast iron cocotte, means that the pot will hold the heat longer and I like the quality of the infusion that comes from using this pot better than my mother's aluminum. There's a steadiness to the cast iron, the calming heft of it, that I need right now. I hand a mug to my father and do not give him a choice: he will drink it.

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I do not consider closely the chemical properties of the lemon-honey-ginger infusion, beyond I know this will make him feel better and I need to keep him hydrated because he doesn't eat when he's sick. But honey has been used for thousands of years for its anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory properties; lemons are anti-bacterial; ginger is anti-inflammatory. The natural world is full of chemicals, their effects dependent on dosage and the method of delivery.

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Yesterday, my mother's infusion happened in the new facility at the University of Minnesota. The staff now walks around with tablets to check in patients; there are no televisions in the individual patient areas; she reports that it feels clinical, rather than comforting and efficient. This is an infusion center. She will still receive a drug cocktail, as if the metaphors of comfort and consumption, of tea time and happy hour and other wonderful things, make us forget what is happening here.
     My mother's body is technically free of cancer cells after the surgery that removed her uterus with its three-pound tumor, but they have told us that if she does not do chemo, there is a 70% chance of recurrence and a 40% chance of survival; with chemotherapy, she has a 90% chance of survival if it returns. This chemo has no direct goal, no tumor to shrink, a destruction of what is currently healthy for the counterintuitive hope that destruction will be the right choice for her life.

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Day 1 Infusion: Vinchristine (V), Dactinomycin (A), Cytoxan (C). Vinchristine and Dactinomycin are given through a vein by intravenous injection (IV push) or infusion (IV) and a port, like the one in my mother's chest, makes the process simple. V and A are vesicants, chemicals that cause extensive tissue damage and blistering if it escapes from the vein. V will be what causes neuropathy in my mother's hands and feet, months from now, so that she cannot walk in her shoes and she hands me the nail clipper because she no longer has the strength in her hands to trim her fingernails. C is a mustard gas derivative. This is the acceptable method of chemical warfare. This is Better Living Through Chemistry.

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Chemicals are how we perceive the world and how we move in it, chemical reactions of cells that tell us what we see and what we taste. Mental illnesses like depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which require other chemicals to treat. The incidence of cancer patients with depression—not simply caused by their diagnosis and prognosis, but by the chemical imbalances caused by chemotherapy—seems to make sense. For my mother, who barely touched her sparkling juice and store-bought lefse as we celebrated Christmas Eve with her at the hospital, she developed dysguesia—what her palliative doctor called the technical term for food tastes like crap—with her body's new chemical composition unable to translate the chemicals of food and flavor to her brain the way it had.

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I am thinking of the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, the first use of mustard gas by the Germans, one hundred thousand left dead, the mustard-ginger-yellow clouds of it destroying the lungs of anyone in its path. Fritz Haber's process that developed the mustard gas that killed so many on the fields of France—and many more in later skirmishes in the last hundred years—is also responsible for ammonia-based fertilizers that turned famine fields into fertile soil, saving millions of lives. In the correct doses, Cytoxan, developed out of that mustard gas process, destroys cancer cells, leaving the healthy cells mostly intact. It is a flip of a coin, this moment to harm or heal, to harm one thing and not another, to aim the mustard gas at enemy soldiers and not your own and be satisfied with the collateral damage, to infuse Cytoxan into your mother's systems on purpose with the hope that this chemical warfare will destroy the fertility of your mother's cancer cells. One thing, not the other.
     From down the hall, my parents cough and I worry about my father's flu turning into germ warfare for my mother, who does not have the white blood cells to fight. I prepare another batch of the magical ginger tea for my father, the work of my hands the only antidote to the cortisol in my blood. We process fear—the threat of harm—physically, chemically. The amygdala portion of our brain communicates chemically with the parts of our nervous system that produce the fear responses, cortisol and adrenaline. But whether fear is physical or emotional remains a gray area and I must be careful as I peel ginger with hands that shake.

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My cast iron obsession began a year before my mother's cancer diagnosis with a Le Creuset skillet I found at the thrift store for $7.99. When my mother was diagnosed, and I started cooking for my parents (my method of coping with stress), I started finding much more in the thrift stores, the bright, rare, vintage cast iron, the Descoware, the Copco, the Le Creuset, the Cousances. Throughout my mother's cancer journey, I've struggled with the food metaphors of cancer, her cabbage-sized tumor, her chemotherapy infusions, the port in her chest, and the rest. As one who cooks, and as one who knows her Sontag, I didn't want any metaphors at all. And so my mode of understanding what was happening to my mother came through the cast iron, through the work of my hands creating what order I could find out of the chaos of raw ingredients, trying to cook anything that my mother would eat.