FIGHTING FOR TIME
A beloved Palm Beach waitress battles cancer
The phone call came at the worst possible time: at work, during the lunch rush, two days before Christmas.
Carrie Rodriguez knew something was wrong. She felt it in her bones. She walked outside to the parking lot, answered her phone and listened to the voice on the other end. Her cancer was terminal, it said.
She cried. And then she tightened her waitress apron and returned to Green’s Pharmacy’s hungry customers, sitting at tables and scanning menus.
“That was my Christmas gift,” Carrie said.
Since then, doctors have told Carrie, a waitress of 14 years at Green’s Pharmacy in Palm Beach, that she has until this month to live.
But Carrie doesn’t believe it. Even now, five months later, sitting in her home and waiting for a nurse to take blood with one of the needles that sit in plastic bags on her living room table, Carrie doesn’t look sick.
She wears a white blouse, ripped jeans, black-rim med glasses and a silver elephant necklace that she never takes off. She holds a blue and white mug, eating a homemade smoothie with a spoon. She laughs at old waitress memories. She beams at a framed picture of her 14-yearold adopted son, Nik, smiling in a school photo.
“He’s gonna be fine,” Carrie said, “and that’s the most important thing.”
Carrie, 59, tries to see the good in most things. The cancer forced her to quit her job, and her medical expenses left her with almost no savings, and soon she’ll move from her cozy two-story home in Lake Worth into a small apartment with two cabinets, a broken fridge and old, shag carpeting.
But all of that also means one thing: Carrie gets to start a new project.
She flips through the pages of a tiny-living magazine, imagining the possibilities. She wants to rip out the carpet. She wants to cover the plumbing under the bathroom sink with a large whiskey barrel. Maybe she’ll build a fence outside for Raven, her 5-year-old brown mutt.
She’ll even be closer to her younger sister, Iris Murphy, who lives nearby.
“That’ll keep me going,” Carrie says.
June seems far away.
‘It’s hard being home now’
The signs are everywhere at Green’s.
A donation jar in the corner. A message written in pink marker on a dry-erase board. A white sign taped to the cash register.
The most devoted patrons at the pharmacy — an old-school
luncheonette with a green and white awning hanging outside — know Carrie well. Some come in weekly, some daily. They used to tell Carrie their secrets and vent about their problems. If they were regulars, she had their orders memorized.
“Egg-white omelet plain, rye toast, sliced tomatoes, salsa,” Carrie said, smiling. “You get used to it.”
When Carrie stopped coming to work, the questions began. They haven’t stopped. “Every day,” said Nanci Lane, a waitress at Green’s for 22 years, holding back tears.
How’s she doing? Is there something I can do to help?
“She’s doing as well as can be expected,” Nanci tells them.
Carrie splits her days into two categories: good days and bad. Days when she can’t get out of bed and days when she is able to drive Nik to middle school. Days when she takes 15 pills from her packed medicine cabinet and days when she gets to skip a few.
Today is a good day.
She walks into Green’s, orders a coffee and sits behind the counter, the same counter she took orders from five days a week, busing split pea soup and cheeseburgers and milkshakes to and from tables.
“I could keep up with the girls at the restaurant,” Carrie said. “And now?”
Now she can rarely visit for a quick lunch. She walks with a slight limp, some days taking three naps. It’s difficult to summon enough energy to do much more. The cancer has drained it all.
“It’s hard being home now,” Carrie tells Nanci, who’s standing behind the counter, taking a short break. “It gets lonely for me.”
“It gets lonely here, too,” Nanci says.
‘Now it’s thundering’
The lights are off. The moving boxes are packed. Carrie sits on the brown sofa in her townhouse, trying to remember the name of a cancer procedure.
“Sometimes I forget words,” she s a i d. “I t hi nk i t ’s my meds.”
The procedure was supposed to give her more time. It failed. And the expenses added up.
For months, Carrie worked through the cancer. “Finan- cially,” she said, “you don’t have a choice.” After she was first diagnosed with colon cancer two years ago, she formulated a plan. She hid her chemotherapy pack underneath her black apron and wore long sleeves to work, snaking the tubes from the pack inside her shirt and up past her arms.
Carrie had to work to care for her son, whom she adopted at birth. The only income she has received since quitting her job five months ago is the monthly check she gets for Nik.
“I don’t have enough child support to go to McDonald’s,” Carrie said.
She took out loans. She maxed out charge cards. She applied for Social Security Disability Insurance in January, hoping for some relief. She was told she wouldn’t receive money until August.
“They said, ‘you should’ve thought about a rainy day coming,’” Carrie said. “I’ve spent all my money the last few years on my rainy day.
“Now it’s thundering.”
‘I’m not dying in June’
The good news came last week.
Carrie was accepted into a clinical research trial at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, with about 70 other people from around the country.
Every two weeks for about a year, she’ll fly to Bethesda for cancer treatments. But Carrie knows there are no guarantees.
She knows there’s no cure for her cancer but said she s t i l l f i ghts, t r yi ng t o give h e r s e l f more t i me. “I ’ m not dying in June,” she said. There are things she wants to see, like photos from Nik’s surfing trip to Costa Rica with another family planned for later this month and his high school graduation four years from now.
“If I make that,” Carrie said, “it will be a miracle.”
C a r r i e ’ s y o u n g e r s i s - ter, Iris, also a waitress at Green’s, believes she will. She is too loved, Iris said. Too strong. Too stubborn.
“I don’t see June,” Ir i s said. “I don’t see June at all.”