"Rearview Mirror"--Pearl Jam

“Well, I don’t know how you feel, but the chemo is doing wonders for your skin!” I smiled at Mom as she rode shotgun on our way over to visit Gramps on Easter. She thought that was amusing, explaining that that was one of the side effects.

The skin of her face was plumped up and very smooth, as if, in addition to getting chemo, they were giving her Restalyne injections. I glanced in the rear view mirror to see that Addison had finally given up and was asleep in the usual crick-in-the-neck way that children slump against their car seats.

Things were going very well. Mom always said that besides the initial diagnosis, they hadn't had anything but good news. The tumors were shrinking, her blood counts were good, her CA-125 levels had dropped significantly, and all in all she was responding surprisingly well to the chemo. We’d had good visits with Mom, including Anna-Lee’s birthday party. The next step, Mom’s surgery, was scheduled for April 7th.

On Easter weekend we tried to have a good time. Mom helped Addison find Easter eggs and everyone sat outside in the hot sun with Gramps, who sat in the shade of the large cherry tree in his flannel pajamas, with a throw around his shoulders. On Easter Sunday we went to church. Mom cried, she held her head in prayer for a long while. I tried not to cry, but my hormones and emotions got the best of me. The pastor's sermon, while centered on Easter, seemed to touch upon the struggles that Mom was facing. He has a way of doing that, though, making you cry, making it seem like he's speaking directly to your concerns.

April 7th was a Wednesday. Everyone else was going to the hospital. I had class that day. Mom and Dad didn’t really see the point in me being at the hospital during the surgery. It would have entailed dragging the kids along with me for the day, or rushing to be back in the Ville by four.

The doctor said that she was really surprised. Her bladder had been in better shape than they had anticipated; and her colon as well. They removed her uterus and ovaries, lymph nodes in the surrounding area. They wrapped some piece of fatty tissue that was in there around her colon to keep things from shifting around.
 
The week after she came home from the hospital she called me, “I want to see you and the girls.”

“Oh, well, I was just going to come down and try to help out, but we can all come. I just didn’t know if you’d be up for a visit with all of us. I just didn’t want the kids to bother you.”

“Well I reckon if I get tired I can just get up and go to bed,” her response was matter of fact.

“OK. I just didn’t know. I was just planning on coming down by myself because I didn’t know if the kids would understand that you are recovering from surgery. We’ll be there,” I couldn’t very well say no.

My husband was looking at me inquiringly when I hung up the phone.

“Mom wants us all to come down. She said she wanted to see the girls,” I told him. He didn’t say it, but I could tell he was relieved. A whole weekend with just him and the kids—it was likely that he couldn’t survive without another adult around.

“Then I guess we’ll all go,” he said.

Mom was in bed when we got there. Dad had made dinner and was waiting for us to arrive. He took the girls to wake her up. And she got up. She was walking around and shit. She sat up for a while with us, ate a little dinner, and watched a little Funniest Home Videos, before going back to bed.

The next morning she was up getting her a bowl of cereal. She took the glass of juice with her fiber and the small cup of medicine as I had prepared them, carefully noting each in the chart. She said, halfway through her breakfast, that she was going to the bathroom, which was apparently a significant and much anticipated accomplishment, if things went well.

Dad, the girls and I were getting coolers and bags ready to go to the mountains. For the girls it was just a day trip, but Dad was going to stay overnight. I was uncertain about going. I had expected to stay and take care of Mom. But she encouraged me to go along, with the promise that her sister would be over later. I was continuously amazed at how well she was doing after her surgery. I don’t know what I really expected, though. Maybe I thought that she needed help doing everything. They say you need 4-8 weeks or more to recover from surgery, but Mom was up and about.

Dad drove us over to spend the day with the Roarks and the Roark wannabes in the mountains, hiking in the humid heat before the rain began. The girls enjoyed themselves, wearing their raincoats, Addison eating marshmallows and chocolate bars and Anna-Lee poking sticks into the fire. Later, we rode back with my Grandmother and Aunt. Mom was resting when we returned, but said she’d had a good day. Her sister had taken her to town to do the grocery shopping for Gramps, and get some Chinese food.

The following day was the best visit I’d had with her in a long time. The girls watched Christmas Vacation in the living room while Mom and I lay on her bed talking. We talked about a lot of things, but I mostly wanted to know about her illness, I wanted to hear it all from her, face to face.

“So what does it feel like to have a bunch of shit cut out of you?” I asked her, “Do you feel like you’re missing a bunch of your stuff?”

We looked at each other, I was curled on my side facing her, and she was lying on her back with her face turned toward me. It was as much like old times as it could be—mornings piling into bed with Mom, waking her up with our talk and laughter, then begging her to make us pancakes.

“You can touch it,” she pulled up her shirt to reveal the long scar on her belly. I poked at her pale freckled skin gently, unsure of what I was feeling for.

“So how does it feel now? I mean, at Thanksgiving you looked—well—bloated, and uncomfortable. But now…”

“You know when I was a young girl and when I would lay down flat, my hip bones would sort of poke out? Even when I had gained some weight my belly would sort of sink in when I would lay on my back. It just got to where it never,” she moved her hands over her belly, making mounding up motions, “sank in anymore. It was just all full of tumors.”

It was about that time that Anna-Lee bounded in and announced that there must be something wrong with their popcorn, because it was all full of kernels that didn’t pop.

“You fixed popcorn?” I rolled over and off the bed and followed her into the living room, “Why didn’t you just ask? How long did you put it in there for?”

“One minute,” she said, after explaining that she could fix her own popcorn.

They had made a mess of the unpopped kernels, so I cleaned up and made them some more, pointing out the popcorn button on the microwave to Anna.

Mom’s eyes were closed when I went back into the bedroom. I kissed her and told her I loved her. She said she loved me too.

The biggest post-op hurdle was getting her bowels to function regularly. No one could have foreseen just how difficult that hurdle was to overcome.