small talks

Here’s an everyday issue – at least it’s happened quite frequently in my life lately. I’m sure we all find ourselves in this kind of meaningless small talks from time to time.

First, something that happened last Thursday. I went to the hospital to have my prescription and buy my meds. After finishing my business there, I decided to stop by the new restaurant of an old friend of mine. I had not seen him for almost five years, and I had some fifteen minutes to congratulate him on his new initiative, tell him about my condition, and promise to come back when I get better. There we were, sitting at a table, talking about the medicines I bought, and a woman at the table across ours called out to me, asking if I had cancer. She asked what type, then told me she had a cousin with pancreatic cancer (God forbid!). I offered my good wishes and continued to talk to my friend, irritated by this intervention.

Today, I had my last session of chemotherapy. My mom and my cousin came with me. The room was empty and, lucky for us, we remained to be the only ones in the room until a woman came to the other bed ten minutes before we were done. She had difficulty in walking, so she explained the reason of her dizziness right away. Then she lay down, and not noticing that I was deeply concentrated in my book, asked me: “From where?” My first instinct was to say “From Ankara”, but I made a wise decision and said “Pardon me?” She said “From where? Which part of your body? What illness?” I said “Oh, breast.” Then she said hers was something (her voice was so low I could hardly hear it) that spread to her lungs (again, God forbid!) and began to tell me about one of her relatives – how she had had mastectomy at the age of 25, she drank only one cup of tea and one cup of coffee every day, she allowed herself to eat fried food not more than once a year, and she was 90 years old now – while her husband (I suppose) told my mother, fortunately not within the range of my ears, that breast was a common problem for women, prostate for men, and that he probably had a problem with his prostate too, but he was too scared to see a doctor. Then he asked, this I could hear, who the “child” was, referring to my 26-year-old cousin. Mom told me, when we came home, that she found it bizarre for this man to talk so freely about prostate with a woman other than his wife or his doctor. I guess I would’ve found it bizarre, too, if I had heard it. I thought everything else they said was awkward, meaningless, unnecessary. I wonder what the man expected my mom, a perfect stranger, to say to him regarding his problem.

Mom’s theory is that people desperately need nice words and prayers to comfort them. I, on the other hand, have a different theory. It is obvious that I have some kind of cancer, as I’m in that room having chemo, and I might not be able to soothe anybody at that moment. So why do they insist on having a small talk? I guess the reason why they ask and tell uninteresting things to strangers is because: a) they are extremely curious about other people’s lives, thanks to Big Brother kind of TV shows, and they think everybody is dying to talk about themselves, b) they need to hear that there are people worse-off.

No matter why, I’m sick of these “boundary-breaking” people. Is it too much to ask for silence when you’re busy with the IV line on your hand?