Game Day
I worked there, 20 years ago, so wandering the halls of the hospital is a trip backward as well as forward. Backward meaning nostalgia; forward meaning whatever the future holds for my friend Rebecca.
I've been the designated driver, given my flexible schedule and some psychological burdens I'm not quite ready to own yet.
I don't want to hear nuthin' about no brain tumors
So a couple of weeks ago, I ran her down to Seattle to discuss financial matters with the hospital, and today I got up at 2 a.m. and ferried her mother and her to surgery. Ten hours; that's what they estimate. Ten hours of skilled hands picking tumors out of her skull, delicate work. Just another day for them, and I watched them straggle in at 7 with their lattes and backpacks and scrubs on.
In the waiting room, Becky scribbled application forms for a newspaper competition, some editorials and reporting. It's due at the end of the week, and she will be otherwise engaged, so maybe not busy work as much as procrastination, but still I was amazed and a little amused that she spent her last moments before the knife doing something so practical and ordinary. Then she handed them to me.
"Mail these," she said, without asking, without questioning, just knowing I would. Whatever.
They disappeared a few minutes before 6, heading for the prep, something no doubt I shouldn't be a part of, and finally it was 7 when I headed home, commitments calling to me and getting sort of lonely there in a deserted waiting room. I hope her mom doesn't feel that I abandoned her. I'll probably go back later.
I looked it up. She's going to need rehab, chances are good. There are probably going to be motor and sensory deficits. Paralysis is not out of the question.
There are lots of questions. Still, she had no choice.
We've raised $10,000 already, the community. I wrote a column last week about her, trying to tweak other readers out of the area. I don't know, I just had to do something.
And I know now. I'm not that much of a saint. I drive her to the hospital because I want to help and because I can't think of anything else to do, not having a checkbook worth anything, owing her favors, liking her style, but still knowing what I'm doing.
Maybe she knows too. Maybe that's why she hasn't had all that much trouble, for such an independent person, asking for my help.
Metastasis seems a big fat Greek word for something that simply means spread. Unless you're a fancy-pants writer and want to wring few syllables just to feel better, it's mostly used when discussing cancer. As in small-cell lung cancer. Which my father had.
I don't want to hear nuthin' about no brain tumors
It spread through his lymphatic system from his lungs to his liver, and they stopped it. Chemotherapy, as annoying as it was, pretty much cleared it out, apparently. It would come back, they said, and eventually kill him, but there seemed to be some hope, at least for him.
Then they found more than 50 tumors in his brain. Game Over.
So, y'know, I'm a little sleep deprived, but I know what's going on anyway. I know that I couldn't be there, even though I could have. I know it was easier to pretend, far away, that it would be okay, to let Mom and Jeanne deal with the daily stuff. My sister would bundle him up, sometimes, and take him out in the wheelchair to breathe daytime. There was worse stuff.
"I had to pull his pants up today," she wrote me once. "Sigh."
I understand enough of my own psychology to recognize danger signs. I know that "brain tumors" are causing certain alarms to go off, causing reflexes that jerk me around. I know this has a lot to do with denial, and guilt, and depression, and hopelessness/helplessness. I know I want to fix things, particularly things I can't, and I don't want to talk about it, just fix it.
But you know what? It isn't about that.
I don't wish that I had been there to see my father deteriorate in six weeks, and still I sort of do. That's where the guilt thing and the fixing thing comes in. Not to mention the theatrical thing. I saw enough, saw the innocence and astonishment play across his face, saw him cry. Enough, anyway. No going back.
But I told him, once, a few years ago, that I was in trouble, and I talked about basketball. I talked about how, one really lovely day, my brother, dad and I saw on the front lawn and laughed, and then, in a goofy moment, I grabbed a basketball and aimed it at the hoop 40 feet away. I missed big time, so I retrieved the ball and handed it to Dad. And he said, "I can't."
He meant he couldn't reach the basket, not so far away. I refused to believe him. I insisted, so he tossed up a shot, not any better or worse than mine, and then maybe my brother tried, I forget, and all the time I was thinking
but my dad can do ANYTHING
Well, he couldn't live with metastatic small-cell lung cancer. not for long anyway. And he couldn't put a ball in a basket from a distance, not in his sixties, age and time, strong arms not withstanding.
It would be easy to think I'm in payback mode. That I'm compensating for being in Washington and not Arizona, back then. That I get a chill when I hear "brain tumors" and want to fix stuff. Pretty easy. But not true.
I drove my friend to the hospital because she needed a ride, because I had the time and schedule, because I'm concerned, because I worry, because I like her, because it's the right thing to do, and mostly, or partly anyway, because I know that's what my dad would have done.
10:49:29 AM 
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