I went with my parents to the oncology clinic. Dad went with my Mother when she was called back, and I waited in the waiting room. A few minutes later, Dad came out, sat beside me and told me the news. It didn’t make sense to me. Mother had a backache. A scan indicated she might have a tumor on her spine, so I knew it could be serious. But breast cancer? Terminal breast cancer? How could the oncologist come to that conclusion so quickly when her condition had baffled her family doctor and several other specialists for months? Well, it turns out cancer that starts out in the breast often metastasizes to the back, and the first thing the doctor did was examine her breasts. One was dimpled. He had seen it all before.
I lost all hope and began to prepare to lose my mother. But she was hospitalized the next day, and they began telling us that with radiation, chemo and surgery in the spring, there was a good chance she could live another three years.
She responded well to treatment. The tumor on her back and the one in her breast began to shrink. She was out of the hospital before Christmas, and she continued to be treated at the oncology clinic on an outpatient basis.
Mother began loosing her hair in January, and she wanted it all off. I had an electric buzz clipper, so she asked me to cut the remaining strands of her hair. I did it even though it broke my heart. Mother was a very feminine woman. She liked clothes, makeup and hair. That was sad, but, generally speaking, Mother was doing about as well as could be expected. The treatments weren’t making her nauseous, and she wasn’t overly tired. I began to believe that she would have her surgery in March or April, her hair would grow back, and she would live a few more years.
On February 4, 2004, ten years ago today, Mother’s temperature spiked. Dad called an oncology nurse at the hospital, and she advised us to bring her in. One of the ER doctors examined her and admitted her. The doctor told us that Mother had a touch of pneumonia and that because of the treatments, Mother’s immune system wasn’t up to scratch and that she needed some help in fighting off the pneumonia. It was a mere touch of pneumonia. There were no other symptoms except for the fever. And we were told that she would probably be better in a day or two. It was late, so we left Mother in the hospital. This was the same hospital she had been in two months before. And it was the same hospital she had been committed to a number of times. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1984, and she periodically had psychotic breakdowns. Mother had been in that hospital at least twenty times.
When we visited the next day, Mother seemed to be in good spirits, and her condition hadn’t changed. They had her on oxygen, but her breathing wasn’t labored. We thought for sure that, with the antibiotics, she would kick the pneumonia and be home in a few days.
The next day, she was having a harder time breathing, and one of the nurses said this was because Mother’s lungs were seriously damaged from smoking. So we thought it might take a little longer, but we still believed that she would be okay within a week.
On February 7, she was having even more difficulty breathing, and they had replaced the oxygen tube under her nose with an oxygen mask that covered her nose and mouth. I was starting to worry, and it was hard watching her. She was not able to catch her breath, and she was obviously uncomfortable.
Dad and I went out to lunch, and while we were gone, someone foolishly came into the room, sat mother up in front of a food tray and removed her mask. The way Mother looked when we found her will haunt me for the rest of my life. She had knocked her food tray off onto the floor, and she was slumped over and on the verge of passing out. She was trying so hard to breathe but couldn’t, and she kept making these desperate little jerky movements. She was like a fish out of water. Her skin was white, her bald head was down, her hospital gown had food spilled on it, and her bare feet were hanging over the side of the bed. I had never seen her look more vulnerable. If we had arrived a few minutes later, we would have found Mother dead on the floor.
The nurses came in, put the oxygen mask back on and helped Mother lie down. And a few minutes later, her lung doctor came in. He said that Mother was going to die within a couple of hours without life support. She had told her oncologist that she did not want life support, but the lung doctor seemed pretty confident that if we gave the antibiotics a few more days, her lungs would clear. That morning, we still believed that Mother had a few more years to live. We were not ready to give up that hope, and the doctor was telling us there was a good chance she would pull through, but she needed the ventilator immediately. So we talked Mother into giving her consent.
She was on life support for ten days. She never improved. In fact, she got worse. After five days, she could only stay awake for a few minutes at a time, and by the seventh day, she lost consciousness completely. I’ll never forget the nurse who came in on the 8th day and cut through all the bullshit. She didn’t tell us to hold onto hope. She said bluntly without being cold or unfeeling that Mother was dying. She said the vent tube could not remain in the throat indefinitely and that, in a few days, it would have to be put it in her neck. She asked us if we wanted to see the scar on her neck when she was laid out in her casket. And she said that our grief was selfish, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to let go. It was time to let Mother go, so we had the ventilator turned off on February 17. My sister, who had driven home from Baltimore with her husband, and I stood by her bed while Dad waited in the waiting room with his cousin. It took about an hour and a half.
We went to the funeral home and made the arrangements the next day. Her viewing was on the evening of the 19th, and her funeral was on the 20th. Mother was buried in the cemetery in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Cherry trees line the lane in front of her grave, and there is a forest just a few feet away with a trail that leads down into the New River Gorge. Mother was 63.
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