Actually, it was probably late June of that year. Mom called, and sounded stressed, so I called her back.
Seems that her UTI that she hadn't been able to shake wasn't a UTI at all. Her doctor referred her to a urologist, who suspected bladder cancer. Now, before you go off on Mom's doctor, you have to understand my mother. She picked a doctor that she could control, told him what she thought was wrong with her, and what she wanted him to give her for it. Yes, he was wrong for going along with her, but that's who she was, and how she was.
But apparently, after almost a year of what she kept calling a UTI, he insisted she get a specialist's opinion. So she was going to see the urologist and find out if there was something going on, right before the 4th of July.
She was 66, and the last time she had spent any time in the hospital was when she was in her early 40s, when they ran some tests on her as she was entering peri-menopause. Before that, her last hospital visit had been when I was born in 1960. She hates hospitals, especially now that they're all non-smoking (she's a chain smoker).
(wow... that's all in present tense. Just pretend it's in past tense, ok?)
anyway... she told me that, and I could hear the stress in her voice, and her conviction that it was going to be cancer, and already be spread all through her.
"Do you want me to come home?" I asked her.
"No," she said..." wait until we know more."
So I took the extra $$ I had that week, and bought a new hard-drive and motherboard/processor (it was desperately needed).
Was talking to Mom again a couple days later, and she said "I sure hate going through this alone."
I should probably explain that I'm the only family member who lives away from the rest of the family. She was by no means "alone," as she put it. But I responded as she wanted me to, dug up the $$ from somewhere (I think my church gave me part of it), and bought a plane ticket home.
When I told her I was coming, she said "I sure am glad."
In between there, sometime after the first phone call, and before I actually flew home, I had been sharing about her on an AOL message board I belonged to at the time. One of my friends from there emailed me to let me know that she'd be praying for both of us. At that time, my prayers were pretty much limited to "Dear God. Fix Mommy. Amen." Not very coherent for an accomplished writer, but there you go. I don't remember being very coherent during that time. Mostly, I was numb.
My friend's email helped to melt the ice that was locking up my heart, and I was able to finally articulate something beyond "fix mommy." I'll share that later in this post.
So I flew home, and went with Mom and Dad to the urologist, where he performed a procedure in his office (spectroscopy? I've no idea, really), and was with her when he said "it's definitely cancer, and we need to remove it as soon as possible. What are you doing Monday the 8th?" (this was Wednesday the 3rd).
I called work and let them know that she would be having surgery on Monday, and that I'd be staying over for it. I had to be in NC on the following Wednesday, so they sent me a plane ticket to get me from Ohio to NC. I had packed so that I was covered for both trips, just in case.
We spent the 4th puttering around, and on the 5th, I took Mom to her favorite outlet mall, to give her something to keep her mind off of it.
I remember going to church with her and Dad on that Sunday morning, and Mom breaking into tears during the singing. Mom doesnt cry often, and she *never* cries in front of her children. But she stood there, hanging onto Dad and crying, while he patted her back with his good arm. I tried to comfort her, but she can't let herself cry in front of her children, and so I didn't really help, because she just sucked it all back inside.
Monday morning we drove her up to the hospital, and waited around while she got settled in. They let us in to see her again, before they wheeled her down the hall. The IV was in, and they were waiting for it to take effect.
While we waited, she told us she'd heard a new joke, and shared it with us and the anesthesiologist.
Seems this man was concerned that his dog might be sick, so he took it to the vet. The vet hoisted the dog up on to the table, and it just laid there. The vet said "I think your dog's dead." The man refused to believe it, and said "how do you know? You've not even looked at him!"
So the vet examined the dog, then he left the room and returned with a cat, which he held out towards the man's dog as he circled the exam table. The dog didn't move at all. "Yep," said the vet. "He's definitely dead." Then he handed the man his bill.
The man read the bill, and exclaimed in shock "TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS!!! Just to tell me my dog's dead?"
The vet replied "well, the office visit was $25, but the Cat Scan was $175."
As we were all laughing (including the anesthesiologist), they came to get her for the surgery. I have always loved the fact that my mom was telling jokes and making people laugh even as they were wheeling her away to surgery.
She was in surgery for a long time, longer than they had estimated. We sat around and stared at the walls in the waiting room. Finally the doctor came out and told us the news.
It was a malignant tumor, but he had gotten all of it.
One of my cyber-friends at that time was a surgeon, and I had asked him for details as soon as Mom had told me what they suspected. He said that with bladder cancer, the tumor attaches to the side of the bladder, and what you need to do is catch it before it invades the bladder wall, because then it can easily spread all kinds of places, and that eventually you have to remove the bladder.
Mom's tumor had been growing for close to a year, if we can assume that all of her UTIs were not, in fact, UTIs. She'd been presenting symptoms for that long. Normally, that would mean the cancer was firmly attached, and already through the bladder wall, especially for as large as this tumor was.
The urologist told us how unusual this tumor was, because while it was several centimeters long (like a stalk of broccoli, he said), it had very little root, and had not penetrated the bladder wall, so he was able to get all of it.
We were lucky, he said.
I nodded my head, but inside my brain I was remembering the prayers I had heard at my church in the couple weeks since Mom's phone call, when they were praying for her health, and cursing the cancer, demanding in Jesus' name that it's roots shrivel up and die. Coincidence? Not in my book.
Mom was still in the hospital when I had to leave for NC. At that point, the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life was fly out of Ohio while my mom was still lying in a hospital bed strapped to a catheter. I felt like the world's worst daughter. But Mom understood.
The bladder cancer came back, a couple times, but each time the urologist was able to cut it out before it got firmly implanted, and he was able to convince Mom to have radiation therapy. As I recall, she had been cancer free for almost 3 years when she died.
I wonder if, in her mind, those 7 extra years were like gravy... I know she fully expected to die that summer in 1996. Her family's normal experience with cancer is that by the time they find it, it's too late to do anything about it, and they just close you back up and watch you die. That's what she expected them to do with her, and she was surprised (and grateful) when it didn't turn out that way.
Looking back, I was much too cavalier in my own interpretation of things. I didn't look at those extra years as gravy, because it was inconceivable to me that Mom would ever die. She was a constant in my life: a stay-at-home Mom that was always there. Home-cooked meals, home-made bread, everything baked from scratch most of the time, clothing made for the entire family (she was an excellent seamstress, and loved sewing). She was Mom. Moms don't leave. It's just not done.
And when she left, she didn't even say goodbye. Just went quietly one night, while we all were sleeping.
She did say her goodbyes, though... my perpetually late mother had already sent out her Christmas cards last year, and many of them included personal notes to the recipient, telling them of something or other that Mom really admired about them. At least 3 people came up to me at the funeral to tell me they had gotten a card from Mom with a wonderful note, and they were going to call Mom and thank her, but got busy. And to each of them, I said the same thing - she knows now. It happened to me, too. I got my card, and was going to call and tell her how much I appreciated it, and how it made me laugh, but it was the last week of the semester and I had 2 papers/presentations that were due, so I figured I'd wait until that Saturday, when I'd be calling her for my birthday. I waited too long. But she knows, even without my telling her.
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