"Uh Oh" --King Kong

“I’ve been thinking of you as the Ice Princess," she had called to talk to me. Mom had come home from the hospital a few days after Christmas, once they had regulated her pain. I hated to bother her when she was feeling bad, so I hadn't actually talked to her in a while.

"Why?"

"Well, you haven't said a word about it at all. You never have even told me you were sorry that I have cancer or anything,” she replied. I hadn't? My mind ticked through all the conversations we had had since then.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t realize. I am sorry that you have cancer. I don’t know what you want me to say. What am I supposed to say?” I was desperately trying to say the right thing.

"Just say whatever you feel like saying."

“God is such a fucking asshole,” I blurted. Probably not the right thing to say.

"Don’t be mad at God.” She said that no matter what happened she didn’t want me to lose my faith; then, for the first time since the diagnosis, we cried together.


“I’m not really mad at God. I just don’t know who to be mad at. I don’t know if I should be mad at the doctors. I just don’t know.” I didn’t say it, but I was thinking that I didn’t know if I should be mad at her. I didn’t want to hurt her. “It’s not fair. I’ve already been through all this shit before. I mean, I’ll do whatever I need to do—whatever you need me to do—you know that. But I’m not happy about it.”

“You think I'm happy about it?” she said, “You think I want to have cancer; to have to go through this? But what choice do I have?”

We talked for a long time. Mostly I wanted to know every detail that she could tell me about what the doctors had said. I wanted to know when--if--she knew something was wrong. Could the doctors have found this earlier? Could anything have been done at all?

Her doctor seemed to think that when she broke her thumb, her body was so focused on healing the thumb that what cancer may have been there, being held at bay, became exponentially worse in such a short time. The last check up she had had with her gynecologist, she told them that she’d had bleeding, weeks, even months, of it. They said that it was just the menopause, like she was an idiot or something. 'You’ve been bleeding, having painful cramps? Oh, it’s just the menopause.' Well, I’d like to know just how long menopause is supposed to last, because she’d been going through “the change” for years.

Then, of course, came the what-if’s. What if she’d had a check up more recently? What if those jack asses at the gynecologist office had insisted on some sort of biopsy instead of assuming that her uterus was full of cysts, rather than tumors? What if they had done more tests? Why didn’t they do more tests when she initially went in with lower abdominal pain?

At Thanksgiving, my sister looked at me seriously (as if she has any other look) and said, “You know Mom is dying, right?”

“Whatever,” I didn’t even think that she had been sick. So I followed Mom into her room and asked her myself.

“Are you ok, Mom?”

“No, I'm not ok,” her response was followed by a painful wince as she pulled on yet another pair of jeans. She was exasperated. Jeans that had fit recently were now painfully tight on her belly. It looked as if she had gained some weight, but only in her belly; the rest of her was just as skinny as ever.

After that, I could tell. She’d been hiding it pretty well. But now her pain was so apparent that she didn’t even really try to hide it anymore. She wasn't her usual jovial self. She didn't stay up late talking with everyone after dinner. Instead she was looking for pain relievers in the cabinet. Ibuprofen rather than Tylenol, then naproxen (Aleve) rather than the ibuprofen; but none of them seemed to work. She told me that she was going to the doctor first thing the next week.

Back in the Ville, I was shopping; I had found the cutest holiday dress for like $15 and just had to tell someone. I called Mom. She didn’t feel well, but she did tell me how her doctor appointments had gone.

At the local clinic they had drawn blood, had her give a urine sample, and gave her a script for antibiotics to treat a bladder infection. When it turned out that she didn’t have a bladder infection, she scheduled an appointment with the gynecologist. The technician who did the ultrasound actually said, “Uh oh,” when she spotted the ‘cysts’ (and let me just tell you 'uh oh' is not something that you want to hear when any medical procedure is being performed. Just ask my oldest sister. But that’s another story). Her uterus was so full of ‘cysts’ that it was way beyond normal size and pressing into surrounding organs. The gynecologists’ solution was to give her pain medication to get her through the holidays and schedule a hysterectomy for January 14th.

The night that Dad took her to the emergency room she had been begging him to just kill her. They had tried a few days of the pain medication that the gynecologist prescribed, but to no avail. The ER doctor ordered a CT and took one look at the films and sent her right away to the Markey Cancer Center. He took one look at it. And the thing is, if she’d had insurance they’d have been testing her like a guinea pig from day one. If she’d had insurance; if they could have afforded insurance, maybe they would have found it earlier. Maybe.

Irata became my mantra. I was livid. I didn’t want to sit around and watch my mother die. I wanted to do something. I just wanted my Mom to be ok. And what was worse, I couldn’t see her. For my children it was the height of snotty sick season, and I couldn’t go contaminate her when her immune system was low from the chemo. It seemed that that first month or so was the longest, just waiting for everyone to be well enough for a visit.

Finally we were able to visit; Addison went right to Mom who was seated on the couch in her favorite spot, working Sudoku. As I settled down beside them Addison gave me a serious look, “GG broke her thumb.”

At Christmas she had learned that GG had broken her thumb, and that she couldn’t romp on Mom anymore because it might hurt her. She had looked from her bandaged thumb to the IV pole and back to her GG.

“GG broke her thumb,” she told me, as if everything that was different hinged on that simple fact.