Well,
it has been a while since I checked in with you all. A lot of stuff has been
going on, so it’s time to catch you up. Basically, my mom, Ruth, got sick in
December. It seemed to everyone, for a few weeks, that she was going to get
better, but a few days after Christmas it became apparent that she wasn’t. She
died on New Year’s Day, in Missoula, with her children and friends all around.
As it happened, while we had all
thought she just had a really bad case of shingles, it turned out that the pain
from the shingles was masking pain from something more serious. She had blood
clots in major arteries in her intestines, probably as a result of a cancer metastasized
from somewhere else in her body. This caused her to die of a massive,
overwhelming infection. We will never know where the original cancer was. She
went from diagnosis to hospice within a few hours.
So I
haven’t been writing much of anything about my own cancer. The only thing I’ve
felt like writing about is my mom, and I am not even ready to write anything
useful about her yet. She was wonderful. I had thought I was prepared for the
possibility of losing her. After all, she was 88 years old, and I’m a grownup,
and I’ve lost people before. Well, I was wrong. Preparing yourself for losing a
great mom isn’t something you can do; you just experience it when it happens.
It is like riding a tsunami. Waves of sadness keep washing over me. It wasn’t
something you could prepare for.
I will
say, I am blessed with the best friends a person could have. At each point in
the last month when I thought I could go no further or my head was just going
to explode, one of my friends would miraculously show up. My brother was on the
same flight from Seattle to Missoula as I was.
My high school sweetheart, who I had been trying to locate for months,
appeared when my mom had been asking about him. My dear friends, Dave and
Natalee, were passing through Missoula on their way from Helena, Montana, to
their home in Seattle, on the very day my mom died. My college roommate, Anne,
saw on Facebook what had happened, and she drove ten hours from Seattle to
be with me. My old friend, Steve, took me for walks when I needed to get out of
that hospital room, and he made sure I ate food from time to time. He and Anne
sat up with me until 4a.m. the night of the funeral, drinking Scotch and
playing Ban anagrams.
I have
been back in Maryland for two weeks now. Life plugs on. My own stupid cancer
gave me another scare last week, when I found a suspicious lump in my “bad” right
breast. That surely got my attention. But the doctor says it is nothing to
worry about, just something interesting that happened. Basically, the implant
in there has flipped over, like a breech baby. Now back of the implant has a
little round lump, where they sealed it after they filled it with silicone. But
now it’s back-to-front, and the lump is on the front, where I managed to find
it. Who knew that could happen? The doctor said turning it back around would
be, basically, way unpleasant, and I should just learn to live with my little idiosyncrasy.
I’m fine with that.
I’ve
had it with “way unpleasant.” As it happens, I am going in for my next round of
plastic surgery tomorrow morning. I have already in hand some serious nasty controlled-substance
pain pills. This is the surgery where I get to have a skin graft. They peel off
a piece of me from my left side and graft it onto my right, to make me a nipple
to replace the one that I lost in the mastectomy. When I met with my plastic
surgeon, Dr. Kathy Huang, on Thursday, she once again asked me if I wanted to
be awake for this procedure. And I laughed at her again. What part of “Hell, no!”
had been unclear? I told her, again, not only do I want to be as asleep as I
can be, but I would prefer to be asleep somewhere on the planet Mars.
But she
and I always have the most surreal conversations. Most of them would be pretty
funny if you were a fly on the wall, listening. For example, tomorrow, my
surgery is at 7:30a.m., but she was explaining why I have to actually be there
by 6a.m., without benefit of coffee.
“We
have to decide where we are going to put your nipple,” she says.
I am
thinking, it would not take me 90 minutes to answer that question. I already
have a pretty good idea where I would put it. But maybe I’m being too much of a
traditionalist. I will consider my other
options. I hadn’t realized there were
other options. I would have stuck it right about here. Measure twice, and cut once, I would say. This is more math
than art, right? But possibly I am wrong. Maybe there is more to this than I
thought, and this is going to involve a compass and a plumb line and a big
black Sharpie pen and be way unpleasant. And all without coffee.
My
doctor also gave me a two-page, typed list, with three columns of small print,
of the many drugs I must not use as my surgery approaches. Fortunately, Scotch
is not on that list. I can’t drink anything, including water, after midnight
tonight. But that means I still have a good hour left…
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