The Amazing Hot Dog of Progress

I kept a few tokens from my cancer experience, and of these the most precious has to be The Amazing Hot Dog of Progress.

Just looking, you can’t see anything precious about it. It is a three-inch refrigerator magnet, a reddish-brown plastic hot dog tucked inside its plastic bun with a lumpy strip of plastic relish wedged on the side

No one would think it looks good enough to eat. But then again, neither did the real hot dogs that my friend Gary and I had enjoyed on tournament weekends as we watched our daughters, teammates on an eighth-grade basketball team. Grabbing a boiled hot dog in a steamed bun at the snack bar between games became our custom; my wife Brenda, a dietitian, ate hummus and carrot sticks while shaking her head.  

When I was hospitalized at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center for my initial, three-week stint of chemotherapy, Gary was among my early visitors. He brought a token of concern: the tiny plastic hot dog. The whiteboard in my room was magnetized, so that’s where he left it.  

On the whiteboard was a grid, drawn by my nurse in the middle of my first night in the hospital. Across the top she had listed the days of the week, and down the left, the six drugs on my schedule. Cyclophosphamide. Daunorubicin. Prednisone. Vincristine. L-Aspraginase. G-CSF. The X’s the nurse marked on the grid indicated which of my toxic friends I could expect to receive on a given day. 

Given the magnet to go with the grid, it seemed natural enough to move the hot dog along as the days passed. One morning, the doctor leading the team on its daily visit glanced at the whiteboard and paused.  

“That’s the hot dog of progress,” I offered. 

I was all about projecting a positive image; anything to shorten the grid and get home again.  

He smiled, which encouraged elaboration.

“The Amazing Hot Dog of Progress,” I added.  

The next day, having shared my blood counts and inquired how I was feeling—constipated, actually—the doctor asked if he could advance the Hot Dog of Progress. I had looked forward to doing it myself, but to hear the doctor acknowledge progress: Sure!  

And so it followed, every morning thereafter, my doctors moving the dog, until the day came when the grid reached its end. Two more hospital stays followed that summer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and then another long one that fall at Brigham and Women’s in Boston, where I received my stem cell transplant.  

Today, The Amazing Hot Dog of Progress resides on a bookshelf next to an angel with wire wings who is raising a lantern and a photo of my daughter, now in college.  

One warm evening, a summer or so back, Gary, his wife Sue and I relaxed on the patio outside their house, catching each other up and drinking a beer as our dinner sizzled on the grill.  

I don’t eat much meat anymore, and especially not hot dogs. But on this night I made an exception, and the taste—amazing.