no balloons

My husband’s aunt is 85, and she was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  It’s late—the cancer, the time, the life.  But the life is precious; they are all precious. 

We visited her on a Wednesday night, just after she’d had a reaction to one of her medications.  It left her stranded beneath herself, somewhere between sleep and panic.  It was temporary.  Did she know?

I sat on the chair beside her, and she reached for me, squeezing my hand. When she fell asleep, I took my hand back, and she awoke again and held both arms out toward me.  I hugged her.  When she fell back to sleep, I got up and surveyed the room.

On the guest’s sofa, far too small for anyone to sleep (though a daughter or granddaughter slept there every night), were magazines and candy bars and assorted toiletries.  In the corner of the ceiling, seven foil balloons, adorned with cheer and imploring Margaret to GET WELL SOON, floated.

1.  Don’t buy me balloons.

I started a list that moment.  No balloons.  These are for children having their tonsils out.  Anyone who brings me a balloon while I am being treated for or recovering from whatever ails me enough that I am in a hospital will be strangulated with their cheerful pastel ribbons. Am I giving too much weight to these helium-filled mood lifters? 

2.  Tell me over and over and over again the truth about my condition.

Make sure you know I understand.  I will squeeze your hand once for yes.   

3.  Ask me lots of yes questions.

“Do you understand?”  Yes.  “Do you want a pizza?”  Yes.   “Should Chuck Prophet come sing at your bedside?”  Yes. Yes. Yes.

4.  If I am never going to get well, get me out.

Don’t let me die in a hospital.  Take me home, and get my daughter to play me out.

I need a longer list: rules about hygiene (mine and yours); lasts—last food, last beer, last song; quality of life stuff. 

Do you think about these things, too?  Does your mind go there when you are beside a loved one’s hospital bed?  Do you look at her gray skin, then at the perky balloons on the ceiling and feel a little bit of rage?

My back hurts. I feel the impending doom of a two-disc fusion.  I worry about the CT scan that checks the progression of my lymphoma.  I fear the fear.  At work, I take a pill and try to put all my black thoughts into a bubble, float that bubble up toward the ceiling. 

But the bubble hits the built-in sprinkler and pops.  Words fall out—on my head, my shoulders, my desk.  I build them into poems. And directives.

u.n.c.l.e.

Today was a day like most other weekdays: long commute, long day writing mostly the same words in a slightly different order, work drama, some laughter coupled with paranoia and worry, a long commute, a beer, dinner, and the laptop and TV in bed.

On Thursdays, I go to shiatsu. I call it that, but Jim Hill doesn't really do pure shiatsu anymore. He's a "healer." He knows what hurts me by what hurts him, and he takes care of it with his own brand of acupressure. I call it poking.

Jim presses my flesh hard with his thumbs and fingers and palms and knees and feet. While I lie on my stomach, he puts the flat of his foot on my tailbone, picks up my legs, one in each hand, shakes them like he's spreading out a sheet on a bed, and pulls slowly. I am an inch taller, but it doesn't count.

When I'm on my side, he twists my arm behind my back in some sort of therapeutic wrestling hold. No holds barred. I say "uncle" in my head and whimper while U.N.K.L.E. plays on the utopia Internet radio station. I'm the only one of his clients who requests something other than the mind-numbing new age sounds. We go for trip-hop—Radiohead and Bjork and Zero7 and Thievery Corporation. My current favorite is Eel, but I don't like them much when I'm not lying on the floor.

Jim presses on my ribs. He grinds his knees into the backs of my thighs, his elbows into my butt, his fists into my shoulder blades. While I'm on my back, he pulls me from my neck, slowly, slowly, and I can feel my tailbone rising up, tucking inside my body, as if I'm turning inside-out.

Before I leave work on Thursdays, I take a half a hydrocodone. I pay $100 for two hours of tortuous poking. Some nights, the pain is just short of intense, and I can fall asleep for a few moments. Other nights, like tonight, It's too much. Jim stops working on my legs to poke a sore line that follows the underwire of my bra. These are lung points, he says, and asks if I've had trouble breathing—he means before now. I cough a little when I lie down, I say. I'll be sure to remember my inhaler. When he goes toward my left side, I worry that he'll touch the cancer. That it'll bust open and gush through my body like an ocean. Last night, I had a dream that I needed back surgery and chemotherapy at the same time.

When my treatment was over, I got dressed and raced home, cursing the slow drivers, blessing my heated seats. On Perring Parkway, I pulled over to let a slow-moving Emergency Medical Services vehicle get in front of me. Through the back window, I saw the EMT pumping someone's chest. He pumped and pumped and pumped. He stopped and looked at a machine and pumped again. He was frantic. I stared through the window, unblinking, hoping the tech would keep going because that would mean the patient was still alive. The ambulance was going too slowly. For two miles, from the beltway to Echodale, I was staring through the back window, thinking of that deer. The tech kept pumping, even as the truck turned right toward the hospital, so I did not cry.

I came home and drank a beer, ate dinner, and came upstairs, where I sit against a kind of pillow called a husband, The Mentalist on in the background, laptop engaged.

- - - - -

A Challenging June

On June 2, I had nine biopsies of some enlarged lymph nodes in my mesentery (that's the "double layer of peritoneum that suspends the jejunum and ileum from the posterior wall of the abdomen," which, I'm certain, gives you a clear picture). I don't think my jejunum and ileum are in danger, but my peritoneum was less lucky. I have lymphoma.

I have lymphoma. I have lymphoma. Lymphoma. Lymmmmm-phoooooo-muhhhhhhh. I say that over and over again. It's low-grade, B-cell lymphoma, which means that it originates in the bone and will grow slowly, and I'll go into remission, but it won't die. It probably won't kill me, either. Yet when I say lymphoma, it still sounds like cancer.

Cancer should be a beautiful thing. It rhymes with Dancer and Prancer—happy reindeer. It rhymes with romancer. My dog, Chancer. And though it also rhymes with answer, I have nothing but questions.

When I was first diagnosed, I did not look on the Internet for information except for the one time I saw that the median survival was ten to fifteen years. I've spoken about it on Facebook. I mention it in conversation. I use it, sometimes, to explain my tears over simple things like getting an IV stick before a colonoscopy. And everywhere I say it, someone tells me his uncle or her grandmother—or, as in the case of the nurse nervously spilling my blood in her second attempt at an IV stick, her daughter—has lymphoma, and he/she has never been treated or is ninety-five or is in remission or is under the care of my own doctor.

Today, I am awaiting the results of my endoscopy/colonoscopy biopsies. Next week, I will have my bone marrow tested. Because I have a stomachache, I will need some sort of treatment, most likely with an antigen—a four-hour weekly infusion. It is not supposed to have side effects, according to my doctor, but it does. (He also says the bone marrow test doesn't hurt, but having Novocaine injected on either side of your spine, then more into your bones, then having the marrow extracted is likely more unpleasant than most things I can think of. So I try not to think of it.)

I am grateful to have had some good care at Good Samaritan Hospital, where I went not for the primary symptom of a stomachache but for a prescription for Nitroglycerine, in case I ever get another episode of the family curse: a spastic esophagus. Before I was to leave the hospital that day in March, the doctor examined me and feared I had appendicitis. I was in tears because I was just about to take my daughter to see Bob Schneider in concert for her first time. The results—nothing wrong in my organs but enlarged lymph nodes that would need to be rescanned in six weeks—weren't particularly scary. Food poisoning or a virus seemed reasonable; lymphoma did not. Nearly all of these discoveries of lymphoma (lymmmm-phooooo-muhhhhhh, lymphoma, cancer) are accidental.

I am also grateful to Dr. Marc Gertner for taking such excellent care of me, for leading me to believe I have a good attitude, for treating me like he would a person he cares about. And to my family for their kindness and patience and money (insurance is denying everything, naturally). And a special thank you to my friends for thinking of me, checking up on me, for letting me cry and vent and be selfish. Thanks for all the cards and messages and homemade foods and offers of financial aid in the form of rock benefits and all the other niceties that somehow seem to rain down on me when I need them most.

But I am uncomfortable needing them. That has made this month even more of a challenge—as have a new car payment and job interviews. Still, I'm plugging away, getting my work done, writing for Baltimore Fishbowl, watching my daughter's musical talent explode. Songs, new and old, are still being sung. Photographs are still being taken. The beer is still being drunk. This life is still being lived.





*That's my girl on drums!