Saturday, March 12, 2011

The best-laid plans

Restarting the blog was the best of intentions, then Dad fell shortly before Christmas, and it's been the world's worst roller-coaster since then. Up and down, from hospital to nursing home, one week everyone planning for his death, the next he's better than he was since before the fall. I had to move him out of his apartment, which brought back such terrible memories of clearing out my sister's house, and since so many things in his place came from her home, it was heartbreaking at times. But I'm going to try to keep at this thing.

I was at the part of the story where I found out she had cancer. Her surgery had lasted more than six hours; I knew when it went past the four-hour mark that it was going to be bad news. Co-workers and online friends all said the same thing, that it was routine surgery, not to worry, but I'd been down this road before and I knew the direction it went.

Gretchen, the friend she'd relied on to be caregiver, called me at work to tell me they'd found cancer throughout the organs around her ovaries -- they had removed the ovaries, uterus, other organs, and some of her intestine, hoping they'd found all the cancer. How it had progressed so far, I don't know -- other than that, as usual, the doctor had poo-pooed her lingering illness, just as my mother's doctor had with her, a woman who was never sick but whose terrible, visible illness had been ignored for months until it was too late.

I put the phone down, and went to tell my colleagues, who all insisted I should go home. I wanted to go down to San Diego and be with her, but as Gretchen pointed out, there wasn't anything I could do and she'd already convinced me to go to Chicago. I flew out the next day, unable to talk to Karen before I went because she was still in recovery, numb from head to toe. Arriving at the hotel, I found most of the people I'd thought of as friends, and who knew what was happening, ignored the situation and acted as though nothing was wrong, making me feel even more numb -- and as though I'd stepped into the middle of someone else's play and didn't know the lines.

Fortunately, my roommate, a good friend from San Jose, had had abdominal surgery earlier that year, and she was kind and supportive, full of information about what the next steps would be in Karen's recovery. She was unique among the people I knew, because she was willing to listen to me talk, not judging, not expecting me to suck it up and pretend it was all OK. I met up with my old BFF who now lived in Chicago, and we toured the city, trying to keep my mind off things, though it was never out of my thoughts. I finally got through to my sister and was able to talk to her, even in her confused and frightened state, as my friend searched for her parking ticket in a downtown garage, the sickly green lighting above the car mirroring my mental state.

I spent the whole weekend going through the motions of having fun, but all I could think of was my sister, how fragile she was and how terrified she must be after hearing all that news. The hysterectomy was wreaking havoc on her hormones, and of course that much trauma to her abdomen meant she wasn't getting out of the hospital anytime soon, since bowel habits are the big deciding factor on release. By Sunday evening, though, she actually laughed when she told me they wouldn't let her go home until she "could fart," and I was overwhelmed by relief that she could at least find something to laugh about in the face of her pain.

Chemo was the next step, after she was released. They would only give her a few weeks to recover from the surgery before they began pouring toxic, deadly chemicals into her ravaged body to kill the cancer, along with pretty much everything else in her system. Knowing how skinny and less than healthy she had always been, and thinking of what the surgery had done to her, I couldn't imagine how she could withstand this poisonous treatment. But they'd set her on this course, and she was ready for it, even if I wasn't.