The nurse beckoned us from our cold, hard chairs where, for the past three hours, we had sat with our silence and our caffeine highs, while life in the surgery waiting room buzzed around us. Headline News had been droning repeatedly on the TV about some terrorist's bombing in London, about bad weather churning over the Midwest, a near-miss on a Dallas runway.
Daddy said, "I believe she means us," as he nudged me to look up at the nurse in the doorway. Her face seemed all at once, kind yet commanding. Daddy and I rose in unison, like marionettes, and went toward her:
"This way," she said, guiding us six steps down the hallway.
She stopped at a blond oak door; smiled at us, and used a key on a chain around her waist. The door was one you would just walk right past under normal circumstances, supposing behind it was a storage room or something equally as nondescript, as you hunted your way down this corridor, eyes lifted toward the signs -- ICU, Surgery, Nurse's Station -- leading you through the starched white hospital maze.
"The doctor will be with you shortly," the nurse said. She stood with her back plastered against the heavy door, holding open the pneumatic hinges for us to pass. "Make yourselves comfy."
We stepped into a small rectangle, not much bigger than a walk-in closet, a plush cubicle of spongy off-white carpet that my sandals sank into. A chintz-covered, overstuffed love seat lined one wall, a wall papered in blue paisleys. A picture in a green frame hung there, all shades of blue, hints of lemon and lavender -- a balcony window on a Tuscany street maybe. Soft light fell from a ginger jar lamp on the end table. A pink box of Kleenex rested there, too. I chose the deep-seated wing chair of mauve and mahogany against the other wall. Daddy took the love seat, perched himself on the edge, holding himself away from its cushiony folds. Both of us sat numb and hovering for a few seconds, taking in the antiseptic air around us.
"Usually they just tell you out in the hall." Daddy teetered a little on the edge of the love seat.
"That's what I was thinking." I eyed the Kleenex box, and also Daddy's stout hands locked together. His elbows rested on his knees. "I didn't even know they had these little rooms," I added.
"Me neither."
He had a habit of sucking at his teeth, just a little popping suck you mostly ignored, something to do with adjusting his ill-fitting partial plates. But he made that noise just then and the sound of it saturated the room. His face stayed frozen on the carpet. Silence settled again between us.
When the door burst open, we both jumped. Dr. Jackson, a tall bounding man, suddenly filled up the room with his rustling white coat, his clipboard and his energy. He called me by my first name, said hello with a nod, then sat down on the love seat beside Daddy. The size of Dr. Jackson made Daddy seem small.
"I'm afraid I've got bad news this time," he said to Daddy. "It's cancer."
"Aw, heck," came Daddy's reflexive answer at that straight-forward word: cancer.
I felt a knot double in my gut. I eyed the Kleenex box again.
"It's already metastasized throughout the lymph system." Dr. Jackson pointed with two fingers at his own collarbone, the place where Mother found her lump. "I went ahead and removed the tumor, but the primary source is somewhere else."
Daddy's head kept nodding like a bobble-head doll. I reached for his hand. He clasped hold of mine tightly. We weren't the hand-clasping sort, and immediately the gesture felt awkward to me. When do you let go? How long is long enough to hold on? Ours was a good-luck family, a family of benign tumors and false alarms, and long lives. We didn't have need of soft, cushy rooms, or pink boxes of Kleenex, or prints of Tuscany -- or of tightly clasped hands.
"The next step," Dr. Jackson said, his voice pingponging around the quiet room, "will be to run more specific tests to determine the exact type of cancer it is, and the location. I'm recommending you to Dr. Barnes. He's the best oncologist around. I've already contacted his office."
"Does Mother know yet?" I asked, my voice finally finding itself, but an octave higher.
Dr. Jackson's bright eyes shifted to me. "She's still waking up in recovery."
"Will you be the one to tell her?" Daddy sounded anxious.
"If you'd like me to," Dr. Jackson answered.
Daddy grinned, an almost skeletal grin, and completely out of place. "I believe you could do it better than me. I don't think I'd know how to say it right."
"All right, then." The doctor started up from the love seat, finished with us and ready to put his energy somewhere else. Daddy and I stood, too. We shook hands, politely exchanged some empty words.
"Take your time in here," Dr. Jackson said, from the open doorway. "The room's yours for as long as you need it."
"I believe we're done. Aren't we, Sister?" Daddy looked at me, and I nodded yes. We were done. Absolutely done. Yet we both stayed still and let Dr. Jackson exit without us. The door hissed shut behind him.
A sucking pop came from inside Daddy's mouth. I stared at the blue paisley wall, trying to imagine the near future. How much Mother would hate being sick. How hard on us all she would be. Cancer: such a mean-sounding word. I wanted to hope, but somehow I couldn't. Those paisley walls, all that blue softness meant for comforting, kept hope from me.
"I knew it wasn't going to be good news," Daddy said. "As soon as they brought us in here, I knew it."
I reached for the box of Kleenex, unused, the first sheet not even threaded through the plastic slit. "I'm taking these with us," I said, an act of defiance. A way to make the hospital pay. Someone should pay. For the falseness of this room. For the changes it would bring. Had already brought. I could see the surrender in the slope of Daddy's shoulders.
We filed together, him first, holding the door for me. I wedged the pink box of Kleenex beneath my arm. We peered up and down the long corridor, like two moles freshly out from our warm digs, both of us unsure which way to go, or what to do, now.
Showing posts with label cancer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cancer. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Friday, February 3, 2012
A Tribute to My Mother
Yesterday was Groundhog Day. Don't think he saw his shadow here, but anyway, I can't remember what's supposed to happen if he does or doesn't. If it means winter is almost over, or that winter has a long way yet to go. Either one is OK with me. We had another two inches of snow overnight, and I like it when it snows. Every window has a beautiful scene outside, while it's warm and cozy inside. Good time for making soups and stews, which are a couple of things I seem to do all right by up here in this altitude.
Yesterday was also the 18th anniversary of the day my mother died. I often get the date confused with the 4th of February, which will be the 20th anniversary of the day my grandfather died. Both days have a poignancy for me, but for now, I want to focus just on one.
My relationship with my mother was tempestuous, to put it mildly. We often went months without speaking, generally because of some way she perceived that I had slighted her. She was quick to hold grudges, even against her children. She went to her death without speaking to my brother. She also had a nasty habit of saying critical things in a hurtful way, and in what my aunt (her youngest sister) called of being tit-for-tat on everything. When she sent out Christmas cards she made a list. If someone on the list reciprocated with a return card, they got a check beside their name. At the end of the season, those without a check got crossed off the list and those names would not get a Christmas card the next year, maybe not ever again. She also expected quick Thank You notes whenever she sent a gift. If she didn't get that Thank You, the gift recipient would hear from her. She was shameless about such things.
People are complicated. Mother was certainly no different. She could be difficult, yes indeed, she could. But she also delighted in holidays, would rather get a sentimental card or note than a funny one, or even a gift. She would sit vigil bed-side when someone was sick or in the hospital, and take over food to the family back home. She loved to dance. And sing. And did both rather well. I remember teaching her The Twist when I was about 9 years old, which made her only about 35 but I thought she was ancient, and so funny for wanting to learn the latest dance craze. Of course, long after The Twist was well out of fashion, Mother continued to do the dance whenever what she called "a fast song" was playing. I think she Twisted way into the 1980s.
She loved to play games, and was also good at most of them, most of the time, especially complex games with tricks and trumps and partners. Although she couldn't be called a good sport because she lost poorly. I remember once when she was playing Monopoly with me and my brother, and was losing pretty badly. When her token (always the Tophat) landed on Park Place, which my brother not only owned but had added several houses to, she refused to pay the rent and instead picked up the board and tossed everything on it across the room. So much for good sportsmanship, but later, probably feeling a little remorse over her behavior, she made peanut butter cookies. She let me dip the fork tines into sugar then mash the dough flat before she put them in the oven to bake. I was proud of the cookies she claimed we made together.
Once when I was in the fourth grade, Mother came to school to have lunch in the cafeteria with me. It was parents' week, and she took off from work to be with my class that day. She wore a boat-neck pullover top in a color of blue that perfectly matched her eyes. Her hair was done in a kind of Jackie Kennedy pouf, and her skirt hit her just at the knee. She wore the pair of fake-pearl cluster clip-on earrings my brother and I had given her for her birthday, and I thought she looked beautiful. When she appeared at our classroom door, I jumped up from my desk and went to take her hand, pulling her into the room to meet my teacher and the other kids in class. I seem to recall that there were a couple of other moms there that day, but mine was surely the best, and prettiest, mom on the planet.
As the years go by, 18 of them already, these sweet memories are the ones that have taken over inside me. I have not forgotten the arguments, the clashes, the butting of heads that she and I did as I grew into womanhood. But it does me more good to dwell on better memories.
At the end of her life we seemed to silently agree to believe in the good that was between us, the love, the devotion if not outright adoration. She was so sick, had lost all her hair and finally couldn't get out of the hospital bed set up in her front room. I spent one afternoon shortening her nightgowns so they wouldn't tangle beneath her, and applying Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion to her bald head because the new hair coming in made her scalp itch.
She struggled with her oxygen hose, and came and went in a drug-induced fog that made her grouchy and abrupt. She ordered me around, ordered Daddy around, too. She didn't have enough breath to couch her orders in kindness. The afternoon I spent sewing up her gowns, she interrupted my task endlessly. Do this, do that. Come over here and help me. I felt like a jack-in-the-box that day, jumping up and down from the sewing in my hands. Finally, she said to me, "Cindy," in a sharp tone that I knew would be followed by some sort of order from Colonel Mom. I sighed and prepared to put down the sewing yet again.
"What now?" I said, probably with some impatience in my voice, too. I looked at her and could see the glaze that had settled over her eyes. Whatever thing she had wanted me to do for her this time was lost in the pain killers, the confusion caused by the tumor in her brain.
Finally she said, "Come over here and kiss my head." She sounded forlorn and pitiful. I laid aside the gown I was hemming, got up from the couch and went to do just that. Her tiny new hair smelled like Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. Her skin felt baby soft against my lips.
These are the memories I choose to keep close to me. I do this for myself as much as for anyone. It's easier to forgive than to hold onto hostilities. And it's a painful thing to lose your mother, no matter how difficult she might have made things from time to time. So much of your own self-definition is tied to your mother, and to those early days. These are things I see more and more clearly, after all these 18 years without her physically in my life.
Onward ....
Yesterday was also the 18th anniversary of the day my mother died. I often get the date confused with the 4th of February, which will be the 20th anniversary of the day my grandfather died. Both days have a poignancy for me, but for now, I want to focus just on one.
My relationship with my mother was tempestuous, to put it mildly. We often went months without speaking, generally because of some way she perceived that I had slighted her. She was quick to hold grudges, even against her children. She went to her death without speaking to my brother. She also had a nasty habit of saying critical things in a hurtful way, and in what my aunt (her youngest sister) called of being tit-for-tat on everything. When she sent out Christmas cards she made a list. If someone on the list reciprocated with a return card, they got a check beside their name. At the end of the season, those without a check got crossed off the list and those names would not get a Christmas card the next year, maybe not ever again. She also expected quick Thank You notes whenever she sent a gift. If she didn't get that Thank You, the gift recipient would hear from her. She was shameless about such things.
People are complicated. Mother was certainly no different. She could be difficult, yes indeed, she could. But she also delighted in holidays, would rather get a sentimental card or note than a funny one, or even a gift. She would sit vigil bed-side when someone was sick or in the hospital, and take over food to the family back home. She loved to dance. And sing. And did both rather well. I remember teaching her The Twist when I was about 9 years old, which made her only about 35 but I thought she was ancient, and so funny for wanting to learn the latest dance craze. Of course, long after The Twist was well out of fashion, Mother continued to do the dance whenever what she called "a fast song" was playing. I think she Twisted way into the 1980s.
She loved to play games, and was also good at most of them, most of the time, especially complex games with tricks and trumps and partners. Although she couldn't be called a good sport because she lost poorly. I remember once when she was playing Monopoly with me and my brother, and was losing pretty badly. When her token (always the Tophat) landed on Park Place, which my brother not only owned but had added several houses to, she refused to pay the rent and instead picked up the board and tossed everything on it across the room. So much for good sportsmanship, but later, probably feeling a little remorse over her behavior, she made peanut butter cookies. She let me dip the fork tines into sugar then mash the dough flat before she put them in the oven to bake. I was proud of the cookies she claimed we made together.
Once when I was in the fourth grade, Mother came to school to have lunch in the cafeteria with me. It was parents' week, and she took off from work to be with my class that day. She wore a boat-neck pullover top in a color of blue that perfectly matched her eyes. Her hair was done in a kind of Jackie Kennedy pouf, and her skirt hit her just at the knee. She wore the pair of fake-pearl cluster clip-on earrings my brother and I had given her for her birthday, and I thought she looked beautiful. When she appeared at our classroom door, I jumped up from my desk and went to take her hand, pulling her into the room to meet my teacher and the other kids in class. I seem to recall that there were a couple of other moms there that day, but mine was surely the best, and prettiest, mom on the planet.
As the years go by, 18 of them already, these sweet memories are the ones that have taken over inside me. I have not forgotten the arguments, the clashes, the butting of heads that she and I did as I grew into womanhood. But it does me more good to dwell on better memories.
At the end of her life we seemed to silently agree to believe in the good that was between us, the love, the devotion if not outright adoration. She was so sick, had lost all her hair and finally couldn't get out of the hospital bed set up in her front room. I spent one afternoon shortening her nightgowns so they wouldn't tangle beneath her, and applying Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion to her bald head because the new hair coming in made her scalp itch.
She struggled with her oxygen hose, and came and went in a drug-induced fog that made her grouchy and abrupt. She ordered me around, ordered Daddy around, too. She didn't have enough breath to couch her orders in kindness. The afternoon I spent sewing up her gowns, she interrupted my task endlessly. Do this, do that. Come over here and help me. I felt like a jack-in-the-box that day, jumping up and down from the sewing in my hands. Finally, she said to me, "Cindy," in a sharp tone that I knew would be followed by some sort of order from Colonel Mom. I sighed and prepared to put down the sewing yet again.
"What now?" I said, probably with some impatience in my voice, too. I looked at her and could see the glaze that had settled over her eyes. Whatever thing she had wanted me to do for her this time was lost in the pain killers, the confusion caused by the tumor in her brain.
Finally she said, "Come over here and kiss my head." She sounded forlorn and pitiful. I laid aside the gown I was hemming, got up from the couch and went to do just that. Her tiny new hair smelled like Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. Her skin felt baby soft against my lips.
These are the memories I choose to keep close to me. I do this for myself as much as for anyone. It's easier to forgive than to hold onto hostilities. And it's a painful thing to lose your mother, no matter how difficult she might have made things from time to time. So much of your own self-definition is tied to your mother, and to those early days. These are things I see more and more clearly, after all these 18 years without her physically in my life.
Onward ....
Sunday, May 22, 2011
A Grave Diagnosis
Lymphoma. It is terminal.
LABOR DAY, 1997. My oldest son is home from Houston for the long weekend. His dad is on the sofa in the den sleeping off a few beers he had drank while we barbecued. It's almost dark. There had been a storm a week or so before, knocked quite a few limbs from the nine pecan trees in the yard. There was a pile of limbs where the greenhouse would one day stand. A soft mewl comes from the wood pile. My son and I both hear it. We go over to inspect. There's a big-eyed kitten on the far side of the pile. He's looking at me and mewling softly but insistently. I want to go for him but each time I try, he appears ready to bolt. I'm afraid that he's hurt. I get down on my hands and knees, calling, "C'mere. Please, c'mere" over and over. He continues to mewl. He looks tiny. He inches forward, slowly. Oh so slowly. It takes 45 minutes for him to inch within my reach but finally he does.
He is gray tabby, but only about half. The under half is pure white. His face is blazed symmetrically with white. Tabby-like, his eyes are golden, outlined with black and black streaks run from the corners of his eyes back along his cheeks. Gray ears, a long straight tail. He weighs maybe 2 pounds. I hold him close to my heart. His heart is pounding wildly in my palm. He doesn't seem to be hurt. I think he's probably just hungry. All I have is a can of white meat chicken, for humans not kittens. His fur is downy soft, silky. It will remain that way all of his life.
Kitten fur, even at age 14. He is my lovey-dovey. My cootie pie. My braveheart. My soulmate. He is my sweet boy, my lap cat, my loyal friend. We are spending our last days together. There will be a big empty hole in my life when he leaves me. The hole has already begun, but right now it's just mostly a hollow lump in my throat that I can't swallow.
His doctor is gone. She left just after she took the biopsies on his kidney and stomach. Another doctor called with the results. "This is a grave diagnosis," he said. The regular vet will be back Tuesday. I will phone her and discuss all of this further. For now, I just want to keep my kitty comfortable.
His belly is shaven, looks so vulnerable and tender now. His eyes are starting to droop. He responded well to the prednisone shot she gave him, caught a lizard the next day, something he hadn't done in at least five years. But that rebound is over, and he is thinner yet. I'm not sure I can take this, but it has to be endured, watching my kitty waste away. I am spending my days holding him, letting him rest in my arms, where he wants to be right now, trying to reassure him, trying not to just sit and cry. Hard but he has earned this time, this love, this vigilance. I can't shut the door on him at night so I'm already exhausted. We both are.
I won't have another cat. Not for a long long while. I've had two before this one but neither of those, not even combined times ten, can compare to the love I feel for this one. If anyone is reading this, please bear with me and my melodrama. A tragedy is happening right now. I feel compelled to write about it. I'm sorry.
Onward ....
LABOR DAY, 1997. My oldest son is home from Houston for the long weekend. His dad is on the sofa in the den sleeping off a few beers he had drank while we barbecued. It's almost dark. There had been a storm a week or so before, knocked quite a few limbs from the nine pecan trees in the yard. There was a pile of limbs where the greenhouse would one day stand. A soft mewl comes from the wood pile. My son and I both hear it. We go over to inspect. There's a big-eyed kitten on the far side of the pile. He's looking at me and mewling softly but insistently. I want to go for him but each time I try, he appears ready to bolt. I'm afraid that he's hurt. I get down on my hands and knees, calling, "C'mere. Please, c'mere" over and over. He continues to mewl. He looks tiny. He inches forward, slowly. Oh so slowly. It takes 45 minutes for him to inch within my reach but finally he does.
He is gray tabby, but only about half. The under half is pure white. His face is blazed symmetrically with white. Tabby-like, his eyes are golden, outlined with black and black streaks run from the corners of his eyes back along his cheeks. Gray ears, a long straight tail. He weighs maybe 2 pounds. I hold him close to my heart. His heart is pounding wildly in my palm. He doesn't seem to be hurt. I think he's probably just hungry. All I have is a can of white meat chicken, for humans not kittens. His fur is downy soft, silky. It will remain that way all of his life.
Kitten fur, even at age 14. He is my lovey-dovey. My cootie pie. My braveheart. My soulmate. He is my sweet boy, my lap cat, my loyal friend. We are spending our last days together. There will be a big empty hole in my life when he leaves me. The hole has already begun, but right now it's just mostly a hollow lump in my throat that I can't swallow.
His doctor is gone. She left just after she took the biopsies on his kidney and stomach. Another doctor called with the results. "This is a grave diagnosis," he said. The regular vet will be back Tuesday. I will phone her and discuss all of this further. For now, I just want to keep my kitty comfortable.
His belly is shaven, looks so vulnerable and tender now. His eyes are starting to droop. He responded well to the prednisone shot she gave him, caught a lizard the next day, something he hadn't done in at least five years. But that rebound is over, and he is thinner yet. I'm not sure I can take this, but it has to be endured, watching my kitty waste away. I am spending my days holding him, letting him rest in my arms, where he wants to be right now, trying to reassure him, trying not to just sit and cry. Hard but he has earned this time, this love, this vigilance. I can't shut the door on him at night so I'm already exhausted. We both are.
I won't have another cat. Not for a long long while. I've had two before this one but neither of those, not even combined times ten, can compare to the love I feel for this one. If anyone is reading this, please bear with me and my melodrama. A tragedy is happening right now. I feel compelled to write about it. I'm sorry.
Onward ....
Friday, November 13, 2009
The Gamble of Life
Life is unpredictable. And at my age, it's also a gamble. I find myself at a stage where I'm having to make decisions now about my future security. It can be something as simple as deciding whether to take a weekend trip. Or whether to stick away the money a trip would cost for later years. I have one decade to save for retirement, and I haven't done much in that direction so far. I waffle back and forth between having it all now, taking trips while I'm still young enough to enjoy them, or pinching my pennies and socking it away for my elderly years.
Here's the rub: What if my elderly years don't come? Who knows what will happen between now and then? My mother socked it away, she took trips, too, but she invested her money and had all the retirement programs that came with her job. She did all the essentials financial advisers tell you to do, and what happened? She died at 64. I think about Mother a lot when I start thinking about financial security. She was disappointed that she had worked so many years and would never even collect on her Social Security. She mentioned it to me, in her last weeks before lung cancer finally took her. She said it was the thing that made her the angriest about dying, all that careful planning, basically for nothing.
My SO also has a sort of laissez-faire philosophy about retirement, and he's closer to it than I am. But he has also had his cancer-death scare, and feels reluctant to deny himself anything because of it. He says when you're lying there, the radiation mask over your face, you make all sorts of resolutions about things you're going to do, if you can just make it through one more week of treatment, if you can just beat the disease. And I do see the senselessness of saving for the future if that future never comes.
We had friends over last night. This is the friend who went into a coma after knee surgery. He's so much improved, but his ordeal is clearly marked on his face. And he still has moments of confusion. He's not ready to resume life as it was, not quite yet. He, to me, is the poster child for the slender thread we walk in life.
I bought a greenhouse kit. It's supposed to arrived via FedEx the middle of next week. My sweetheart is dreading the prospect, but he's so patient with me and my tangents. He seems to always want to make me happy. I can't believe how I lucked out finding such an affectionate and caring man. The gamble of life again, I guess. Anyway, I need someplace to put all my established foliage plants, and it will be fun to start seeds there, maybe take cuttings again. I enjoy growing things from cuttings, and you need a greenhouse to do it properly. Daddy's excited about it. I think the greenhouse will give him an excuse to come over more, and that will be a good thing, too.
Think I've finished the children's book. A friend whose an elementary school teacher read it and really bragged on how much she loved the character, said she would definitely read it to her class when it's published. She seemed so certain it would be. She made a suggestion for the ending, said it was a little too abrupt, and so I have worked on it and think I've made it better. I might be ready to submit it to a publisher now. Don't know why that's scaring me a little. Got to man up, as they say. Be brave. I've been down this road before, after all. It's just been awhile.
Onward ....
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