Wednesday, December 28, 2005

The doctor put a needle the length of my forearm in between my mother’s ribs. The syringe filled with yellow as he gathered a sample of suspicious fluid from a swelling in her body cavity. She gripped my hand hard as I laid my head besides hers on the pillow. I tried to match my slow breathing with hers, willing her to breathe with me, to stay calm. Because she had every right to not be.

At her three month check up a few weeks ago, the doctors scanned for cancer, and found none. They would have sent her home with a smile except for suspicious pockets of fluid—which could be left over from the body’s attempt to defend itself from the five weeks of grueling radiation treatment or the site of more cancer just starting to develop. At this point, we just don’t know. Hence the needle.

“I keep taking one step forward and two steps back,” she says. But not really. She is doing well, especially considering the doctor originally gave her a 30%-50% chance of survival after five years. Her expectations are, like her, larger than life. At each stage, she keeps thinking/hoping/warding off fear by imagining this as the end, the worst, and nothing else really bad will come after it. The same confidence in herself and the benevolence of fate that made her a successful Alaskan bush nurse doesn’t serve her well as a patient. She is continually setting herself up for disappointment.

She thought she had been through the worst of it with the chemo. Yet radiation did far more damage than the chemo ever did. She projectile vomited or leaked out every ounce of nutrients and fluid that went into her. Her bald head and protruding bones made her look like a concentration camp victim, caught in deadly black and white. She scared her granddaughter away. After four weeks of radiation, I begged my mother to stop, hope overcome by the strength of my fear. “Please, Mom. You’ve done enough. You’ve just done enough.” But she went back. Again. And again. Five more times. Until she had done all the required treatments. “I’m going to lick this,” she told me.

When the treatment was over back in October, my Mom thought she should be well in a week. She pushed herself too hard, too fast and spent days resting after too much exertion. On one of those days, I found her on the back stoop, throwing up into the bushes. She couldn’t make it back inside. My daughter called me from the kitchen, and I was torn, as I often was, over which call to answer first. I held my mothers head, and said cheerfully to my little girl, “I’ll be right there.” Obviously, my tone wasn’t soothing because her head came peeking around the corner. I stepped in front of my mother, shielding her with my body. She didn’t need to see this, to see her grandmother suffer. I asked her to get me a washcloth, and off she went, eager to be a big girl assistant. I helped Mom back into the house, trying not to say “Why do this to yourself?”

She raged against the body that wasn’t healing as quickly as she thought it should. Hope and fear fed on each other, pushing her too far, too fast. As soon as she could, she caught a plane to Alaska, nine months from when she had arrived in South Carolina. I told her as she was hugging her thanks, “You carried me for nine months. We’re even now.” We both thought it was OVER. Finally over. But it wasn’t.

Once in Alaska, Mom struggled to keep up with the demands of living on the edge of the world. Hauling water. Cutting wood. Repairing a roof. Breaking new trail through high drifts. She did it, but barely. I received broken phone calls, “I don’t know if I can do it. I may have to sell out my land, my cabin, my Alaskan adventure.” Her sense of loss bled though the phone. She was glad to come back here for the three-month check up where she has running water, an indoor toilet, and food prepared for her.

We don’t know when she will be able to go back to Alaska. For the first time, my mother is facing her limitations and is beginning to rethink her expectations. “Every time I go in for a test, it’s more bad news,” Mom says, her head in her hands. Our eyes lock, and we are both thinking of more chemo, more radiation. She looks away, “Maybe this time, it won’t be bad news.” I look away, too. Maybe if she can’t see my eyes she won’t see my fear. I don’t want her to mistake my fear for lack of hope.

Despite my fear, I will continue to be the sympathetic witness to her suffering, if she needs me to be. I have watched her take pain I can’t even imagine. I know her passionate will to walk consciously through the world, despite the pain of staying alive. I have hope regardless of my fear--maybe, because of it. Without the fear, hope would have nothing to rise up against. They are complements, twin exponents of a single thought.