Riding Fury Home (35 page)

My mother smiled, this time a genuine smile of relief and gratitude. “Oh, thank you!” she said. I could tell she was hearing this differently than I was. My mother clutched at hope. But I heard “prolong” as a death knell, a bell tolling
sooner or later, sooner or later
.

 

 

DANA AND I WERE sitting on a couch in the hospital lobby, holding hands. We'd just left Gloria's room but had needed to stop, rest, and breathe before stumbling out the entrance. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and glanced over to see the emergency room doctor hovering near me. He came around and stood in front of the couch. “You two are just terrific!” he said. “Real troopers!”

“What?” I said, looking up at him. There was a strange brightness to his eyes.

“You know, to be so calm and collected for such a grave diagnosis. Ninety-seven percent of cases like this are fatal. You two are really something!”

My stomach recoiled as if punched.

“Take care, you two!” He was grinning at us, almost gloating.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” I said to Dana.

We'd been on our way out to dinner, and so we went, stuporous and without appetite, but it seemed the thing to do. We walked to Petroushka's, a Russian restaurant a couple of blocks from the hospital, and asked for a private corner table. Dana and I sat there, quiet and windless. The rage that had flared in me toward the doctor was supplanted with a lump of fear and anguish: Would my mother die soon? Spasms gripped my belly and throat, my hands and feet were numb, and my vision and hearing closed in.

The next day I went back to the hospital in the morning. Dana had gone to work. “How are you?” I asked my mother, after leaning in to kiss her.

“Much better. I can get my breath, now that the diuretics have kicked in.”

“And how are you doing emotionally, I mean?”

“Up and down. One moment I'm really scared; the next I just feel in the end this will be okay.” She looked at me with her moist doe eyes.

I sucked on my lower lip as I nodded acknowledgment. Then I started to tear up. “Anything on?” I asked, bobbing my head toward the wall-mounted TV. A few minutes of this kind of talk were all I could bear right now.

We were watching Vanna White spin the wheel on
Wheel of Fortune
when Dvora showed up as promised, regardless of the fact that she lacked hospital privileges. Gloria clicked off the tube. Dvora asked how she was. Gloria beamed at her, all sun. She adored her doctor.

Dvora told us she'd gone over the test results and talked to the hospital gynecologist. She explained about the tumor, that it was large and possibly wrapped around Gloria's intestines. She had a
referral to an excellent surgeon who specialized in gynecological oncology.

“Gloria, we'll just take this one step at a time,” Dvora said. “They're going to send you home soon, and then the next step will be a consultation with the surgeon.”

“Yes, of course, one step at a time,” my mother echoed.

Dvora patted Gloria's arm. “Good,” she said. “I'm going now, but I'll be seeing you soon.”

“Be right back,” I said to my mother as I followed Dvora out the door. We stood in the hall. I told her what the emergency room doctor had said.

Dvora inhaled sharply and exhaled a quiet sigh. “Well . . . ” she hesitated, “ . . . in all likelihood, your mother will die from this. But no one can say the time line. I had a patient with ovarian cancer who lived several years.”

She must have seen the collapse in my face. “I'm so sorry,” she said, “This is so hard. Come here.”

Dvora's arms were around me, and I was crying against her shoulder. She patted my back. After I quieted, we stepped apart. I blew my nose and gathered myself to say the next bit. “There's something else: My mother believes in honesty, and so do I. She has a right to know.”

Dvora waited while a nurse wheeled a rattling cart loaded with medicines past us. “Of course, but truth is tricky, and not absolute. There's a negative impact to such a statistic, and it's not necessarily helpful, or of use to a patient. For Gloria, I think it makes sense to wait until after the tumor has been biopsied, the diagnosis confirmed, and her cancer staged. We'll have more information. Then she can be informed of the findings. Right now, she needs her strength to get through surgery.”

“Okay, I can see that. Thanks.”

I rearranged my face and stepped back in the room. Gloria looked at me. “You've been crying.”

I could never really hide anything from her. “Yeah, this is scary.”

“I know, darling, but here's what I've decided: I'm going to lick this thing,” She nodded her head emphatically, her silver curls ringing her face. “I'm going to lick this thing, and I am going to live to write a book about my life.”

I stood there a moment, uncertain what to say. Who could deflate the glory of her insistent vow? Not me. I stepped in close, took her hand and kissed it, then stroked her arm.

“That will be one hell of a story,” I said.

ON THE DAY BEFORE my mother's surgery, Dana and I were helping her settle into her hospital room, when her surgeon arrived. In the month since her emergency room visit, my mother and I had met with him for a consultation, so we knew his manner was brisk. Now, Gloria sat up in bed, listening while he explained that he would remove as much of the tumor tissue as he could without damaging any organs it might be adhered to. Since some of the tumor had invaded her intestines, he would not know until the actual surgery how much intestine would have to be removed. At worst, she would end up fitted with a colostomy bag. “Any questions?” he asked.

“No,” my mother said. She smiled then, a jaunty, defiant smile. “As I've said, there is no cancer in my family.”

I stared at her, flabbergasted. Although it was true that the cancer diagnosis couldn't be absolutely confirmed until after surgery and biopsy results, no medical person along the way had suggested that there was any other explanation for the size of her tumor and her symptoms.
This is crazy,
I thought,
but then again, she needs hope.

On the morning of surgery, just after dawn, Dana and I accompanied Gloria as she was wheeled on a gurney down the elevator, through the halls, and to the pre-op room. We sat with her while she was prepped, and then gave her a flurry of kisses and pats before she was wheeled away. As I watched her go, my heart started
ka-thump
ing fast.

We'd been told it would be a long surgery. We went back to my mother's room, luckily private, and Dana lay on Gloria's bed. I tried to read a paperback, but found myself unable to focus and gave up.

The surgeon's visit, six hours or so later, was brief but heartening. The tumor had been wrapped around various organs, and it had taken a long time to get it all out, but overall it had gone well. Best of all, he had been able to reconnect her intestines, so she didn't need a colostomy bag.

 

 

IT WAS EVENING, HOURS past my mother's surgery, when we were finally allowed ten minutes to visit her in the intensive care unit. Dana and I pushed through the double doors into a place so brightly lit it felt like a stage set. Machines beeped, bags of fluid hung from poles, monitor screens glowed with moving green lines, ventilators pumped and hissed, nurses in scrubs were everywhere.

We'd been forewarned that my mother was on a ventilator. Still, I wasn't prepared. As we neared her bed with its metal rails, I could see her eyes roaming frantically. A plastic tube filled my mother's mouth, pushing her jaw open, while a band of white adhesive covered her cheeks, holding the tube in place. Her hands were tied to the sides of the bed.

For a moment, the horror of her imprisonment so stunned me that I halted several feet from her bed. Perhaps my alarm showed
on my face, because the nearest nurse said, “It's okay. Her hands are strapped to keep her from pulling the tube out. Patients who are still groggy from anesthesia try to do that.”

I nodded, “Yes, I understand,” and took a step closer to the bed, threading my way past the IV pole.

Leaning over my mother, I forced cheerfulness. “Hi, schnookie.” Her eyes focused on me. I offered my good news: “We talked to the doctor. He says your surgery went well, really well—and you have no colostomy bag.” Her eyes widened. I wasn't sure how woozy she still was, if her understanding might be blurry, so I repeated, “You didn't end up needing a shit bag.”

Two nurses near me giggled. My mother raised her eyebrows, looking exclamatory.

Gloria began flapping her right hand against the restraint. I turned to the nearest nurse and asked if she could untie one hand. “Only if you hold it the entire time. Don't let go for a second,” she said.

“Certainly, of course.” I watched the nurse untie the strap. As I held my mother's hand, she scratched her nails against my palm.

“I know this is hard,” I tried to soothe her. “This is just until you recover from surgery enough.”

She kept at it, scratching my palm over and over, relentless. At first, I thought she was just expressing her anxiety. Then it hit me, what she was trying to convey. “Do you want to write something?” I asked. She scratched faster.

“Do you have a pad of paper and a pen?” I asked a nurse.

“I think so.” She went away. When she returned with a pencil and a small pad, she said, “But I can't untie her other hand. It's not safe.”

“That's okay. I'll hold the pad for my mother.” I reached for the paper while I flashed the nurse a smile, dependent on her goodwill.
I gave my mother the pencil, letting go of her hand, and held the pad above her, where she could reach it.

In wobbly, primary-school block lettering, she began to write letter by letter, “W-h-a-t . . . ” As she wrote, I read each word out loud: “What . . . did . . . I . . . do . . . to . . . deserve . . . this?”

As I read the last words, I let out a choked sound, followed by a hollow “ha ha.” The embarrassed laugh jumped out of me as I imagined the nurses taking offense.

I said hurriedly, as much for the nurses as for my mother, “No, no. This isn't punishment. You're on the breathing machine because you're still weak. I swear, they'll take you off as soon as you're stronger.”

Just as suddenly, my face began burning and my chest contracted with shame that I had laughed, as if making light of my mother's terror. These strangers didn't know the context of her fear: this reminder of psychiatric confinement. I imagined her memories of being tied down for electroshocks, administered over and over against her will, of being locked in a padded cell. The powerlessness of no escape.

I took the pencil from her and held her hand. “It'll be okay, Mom. This will be over in a while. I know it's awful. Hang in there, sweetheart.” Her eyes brimmed, liquid with distress.

One nurse came close. “Mrs. Wilson, you did nothing wrong; we just want to help you. People need oxygen after surgery, but they might pull the respirator out, and that would be dangerous.”

I squeezed my mother's hand and repeated, “As soon as you're stronger, you'll be off the ventilator.”

The nurse motioned us to leave. “We'll see you soon,” Dana added. I turned away quickly, not wanting to watch the nurse retie my mother's wrist.

 

 

WHEN I RETURNED THE next morning, she was still hooked up. For her, it must have been an eternity. Dana had to go back to work, so I was alone in the hospital that day. I was allowed to visit the ICU once an hour for ten minutes. Each visit was wrenching, filling me with anguish at my mother's distress. I tried to reassure and soothe her, but she remained frantic. As I held her hand, I could barely breathe myself. The
whoosh
and
hiss
of the ventilator, those inexorable bellows, ticked the seconds. It scared me that she was so weak she couldn't breathe on her own. She was sixty-eight, and more frail than I'd realized.

At last, late in the day, she was wheeled into her room. IVs and morphine drips were attached. There'd been a lot of cutting, and managing her pain turned out to be tricky. She would sleep awhile and then wake, whimpering, and I would call the nurse in and tell her, “She's still in a lot of pain.”

One afternoon four days postsurgery, Mom was dozing. I sat nearby, my head nodding toward stupor, when the surgeon came in briskly. My head shot up and I called out, “Glor, Dr. Klein is here.”

She startled awake. “Hello, doctor.” She smiled in his direction.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Wilson. I've received the biopsy results,” he announced with little preamble. “As we suspected, they confirm ovarian carcinoma. Because the tumors have spread through your abdomen, I stage it as Stage Three.” He offered no prognosis. “Any questions?”

Sorrow gripped me as I looked toward my mother. Her face had gone flat, almost expressionless. Her mouth hung open, as if it was hard to catch her breath.

“No, Dr. Klein,” she said faintly.

When Dana arrived after work, she went off to the nearby medical students' bookstore and looked up statistics. “Do you want to
know?” she asked me when we got home that night. “No, don't tell me.” I knew Stage Three was one short of the worst. I was hoping the chemotherapy would at least extend her life several years, if not provide a miracle, and I wasn't ready to hear anything contradictory.

There's something repetitive and almost timeless about sitting in a hospital room: sounds emanating from multiple televisions—yours and those across the hall—the sterile walls, the clanking in and out of trays with food or medicine, the rounds of nurses checking vital signs. I floated along in exhaustion, witness to my mother's suffering and the rhythms of her care, struggling with when to advocate for her, when to remain politely quiet.