I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  As her surgery looms closer, I find myself feeling sentimentally attached to my mom’s breast. It makes no sense. Like many people my age, I wasn’t breast-fed, nor have I been particularly close with my mother for most of my life, but I am mourning the loss of this body part, maybe more than she. She is approaching the surgery with a very practical attitude. “I’m not using it anymore,” she tells me. Bit by bit, I am losing parts of my mother, and I am tempted to call her doctor and ask if I can preserve her breast, like a relic, in one of the pricey BPA-free glass containers I’ve invested in so my son won’t have plastic leaching into his body.

  When she announces she doesn’t want to have an implant, my sister and I phone her together to make sure she’s thought through her decision thoroughly. We’re concerned it might affect her self-esteem, but she’s worried about the safety and the longevity of implants.

  “You’re seventy-seven,” I remind her. “You probably only need it to last for ten years at the most. If you’re worried about leakage, I’ve got these inserts shaped like chicken cutlets; I used to put them in my bra for auditions that call for cleavage.” I have no idea what they’re made of, but they’re very durable. I’ve had the same set for fifteen years. “We could ask your doctor if we can just stick those in there.” That’s when she reminds us that she will need only one.

  We’re stumped. None of us know if there are implants on the market that will mirror my mother’s remaining seventy-seven-year-old breast. I suggest she ask her surgeon for a marsupial pouch in which she could carry her phone, mints or that grandma standby—balled-up, slightly used tissues.

  “I’ve got a few old cashmere sweaters,” I offer. “They’re so soft and probably the right consistency; they used to make them with such tight weave. What about a chunk of my Tempur-Pedic pillow? It really does mold to any shape you want.”

  I remind her that having only one breast can cause an imbalance in equilibrium. Walking down the street with my mother is already dangerous. She tends to veer slightly and has a lot of pent-up frustration. I worry she might steer my father, who has begun to shuffle ever so slightly, into oncoming traffic either on purpose or by accident. But she’s having none of it.

  I arrive the night before the surgery. It will be the first time I will visit them since they’ve left our old home. I pull up to the condo and see that the building is situated right on the beach, convenient for healthful, invigorating walks. I’d hoped that wherever they landed, they’d meet new people. As I head inside I discover that each wing of the building has its own elevator, a luxury feature that is intended to make the building seem exclusive, but it has the opposite effect of what I was hoping for them. The elevator opens right at their front door. They share this elevator with only a small number of tenants, who live on floors directly above and below them. During my stay, I see no one else in the building except the staff and learn that my parents haven’t been strolling along the water either. They’ve arranged the furniture in an identical configuration as it was in their home and, because they feel the place gets too much light, they keep the curtains closed. They’ve completely re-created their old home, right up to the lack of a view.

  I get no sleep the night before the surgery because I’m still on Los Angeles time and my husband and I need to coordinate a new carpool, music lesson and sports practice schedule. This process is made slower because my parents can’t figure out how to access their new Internet service. They tell me their password is the address of the old house, but they can’t remember what they’ve named their wireless connection. I try dozens of combinations of passwords and network names and they pull out service manuals they’ve taken to their new residence where they think they’ve written down the codes, but none of them are correct. In addition, the service manuals are for electronics they no longer own: a Betamax, an answering machine and a slide projector. I can’t get online and am slowly texting times and dates until it’s time we take my mother to the hospital for her early morning pre-op intake process.

  Everyone who greets us at the hospital, from the surgeon to the administrative staff, is extremely courteous and helpful. “Say something funny,” Juan, the young orderly, says when he hears I work in comedy, as he wheels my mother into the pre-op room. My mom is chattering on and on about relatives who are no longer alive, relatives she is no longer in touch with and relatives who are no longer in their right minds. She’s nervous. Juan looks at me expectantly. “My mom’s brain surgery was easier to deal with—she was sedated longer,” I say. The hallway at Mount Sinai Hospital is a tough room.

  While my mother is in surgery I stop into the cafeteria for my Cuban sandwich and a café con leche and run into the wife of the homecoming king of my high school class. We’ve kept loosely in touch through social media, but we’re not close enough for me to have known that our former monarch is in the hospital, too. When she tells me this news, there’s the briefest pause in our conversation. She doesn’t tell me what he’s doing there, and I don’t ask. I know this is how it will be from now on: if someone doesn’t offer, you don’t ask.

  It’s startling how quickly the surgery is over and Mom is assigned a room. Waiting for her to rouse, I see that she’s got a bay view; in fact, we can see Sunset Island II just across the water. We’re less than two miles from our old house. I know I must be really tired, because I’m entertaining the notion that this whole surgery was just an attempt to get closer to the island. But as soon as she wakes up it’s clear that she’s headed for a quick recovery, because she’s already complaining about how slow the nurses are.

  Before we’re allowed to leave the hospital, a nurse instructs me on how to manage the drainage tubes that collect the bloody discharge from the incision, a process technically referred to as “milking.”* I’m so glad I’m the mother of a teenager. I’ve taken my son to see enough vampire flicks that the sight of blood doesn’t faze me a bit, thank you, Stephenie Meyer. You squeeze the blood down through the tubes, inch by inch, until it collects into a bulbous container, and then you empty the liquid from the bulb. Repeat every few hours. Each time I do this, my mother gazes at me with the wide-eyed expectancy of a toddler on the first snow day of the year. Socks, underpants, long underwear, sweater, snow bib, parka, boots, mittens, scarf, earmuffs. “Now let’s put your hood on. Good girl!” It’s a lugubrious process made even slower by the antediluvian equipment. The nurse asks us if we’ve got any safety pins. “No.” She shakes her head as if everyone carries safety pins with them at all times. “No one said anything about safety pins,” I say, my practiced hospital patience beginning to wane. It takes three different nurses to locate two safety pins. Once we’ve been sufficiently chastised, our nurse shows us how we’ll be pinning these bloody bulbs inside my mother’s blouses while she heals. How is it possible that we can collect energy from the sun through photovoltaic panels, but we can’t collect blood except with a jerry-rigged contraption that includes safety pins?

  At ten p.m. we’re told she’ll be going home the next day. That’s when I get the brilliant idea that I might be able to make it back to Los Angeles in time to accompany my son to Fuck Yeah Fest, the indie rock festival he’s been pining to attend. He’s planning on meeting up with several girls who are going to be there. I’ve been read the riot act. I am to accompany him to the festival grounds and disappear from sight, dissolve into the ether, if possible, until he’s ready to go home. “So, is there someone you like?”

  “I just want to make out with girls.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “No, Mom, any girls.” I have found a purpose in my son’s life. This will mark my new incarnation as a wingmom. So with the help of more of that local café con leche, I pull another all-nighter. I purchase concert tickets online and begin making lists of after-care procedures for my sister, who is scheduled to fly in and take over after my departure. I’ve collected times and dates of support groups for cancer patients, meditation classes for
cancer patients, yoga for cancer patients, bra fittings for cancer patients—there are even makeover days for cancer patients. With one out of eight women in the U.S. being diagnosed with breast cancer, the related industries are so extensive, I almost expected to find a service providing cancer for cancer patients. I record the contact numbers for mom’s doctors and home health-care provider, plus an admonition to make sure to have extra safety pins on hand as well.*

  By the next afternoon, we’ve gotten my mother home, and by the evening I feel satisfied that she can perform her own milking and has the meds she needs, at least until my sister arrives. I beg my parents to open the curtains once a day, knowing full well that they won’t, and I head to the airport to catch the last flight of the day out of town.

  My plane lands at midnight. After stopping for gas, I accidentally drive over a small concrete island and knock off one of my hubcaps, but my mother just had a boob lopped off, so I’m able to shrug that off without too much fuss.

  A few hours into the next day, my son and I head to the festival grounds located in an industrial area on the outskirts of Los Angeles. It’s dusty, loud and 102 degrees. It takes us over an hour to snake through the long line of teenagers until we make it to the entrance, only to find out that in my exhaustion I bought tickets for the wrong day.

  “Please, please, let us use these tickets today,” I beg the security person but he’s not budging. “Do I look like I’m trying to sneak into this concert?”

  “You’ll have to come back tomorrow, ma’am.”

  “That’s right, I am a ma’am and you couldn’t pay me to come back tomorrow.” My son is mortified and moves several feet away from me. He wants nothing to do with me. I have not only screwed up with the tickets but also in doing so, totally lost any sliver of credibility I might have had in the ongoing campaign to get us organized at home.

  I get the silent treatment until I agree to drop him off alone at the fairgrounds the next day, something I consent to because by this point, I’ve only got the briefest connection left to my sanity. As I speed away from the concert grounds I pass a billboard with the alarming sentiment “Prepare for a Longer Retirement,” writ large. I turn on the radio just in time to hear that suicides, formerly the domain of disaffected teenagers and depressed seniors, are suddenly on the rise for boomers and researchers aren’t sure why. Ask me. I know why! It’s a miracle that billboard alone isn’t sending drivers careening off the roads lemming-style.* During what seems to be an interminable drive home, I remember that I’ve left my phone charger and night guard on the plane.

  But there’s no time to dwell because I’m going to be needed for the next emergency soon enough. And wouldn’t you know it, this whole episode has left me with a whopping credit card bill; between the last-minute plane tickets, the misplaced dental appliance and the concert debacle, I’ve spent over a thousand dollars in the last two days, and I’ve got a big honking pimple on my chin.

  SAVES

  Dear God,

  Forgive me, Father, for I have Googled. I have Googled the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and even Yahoo! Answers.

  Googling health problems on the Internet is normally a bad idea, but at forty-nine, it’s a disastrous mistake. Any ache or pain can be linked to an impressive number of horrifying age-related conditions. From what I could deduce this time, I appeared to be suffering from a degenerative form of arthritis and Heberden’s nodes, also known in colloquial terms as old-lady hands. Fucking fifty.

  It was an early Monday morning in October, one month before my fiftieth birthday, when I awoke with the certainty that a substantial percentage of the twelve million cars that travel the Los Angeles freeway daily had spent the night driving back and forth over my hands. The little finger on my left hand appeared to be crooked, and a bump on the distal interphalangeal joint (that’s the middle one) of my right forefinger was swollen. Any movement was agonizing. My neck was also slightly compressed. I use the word “slightly” because my skull has never actually been clamped into a vise, and I imagine that a vise might be preferable to the electric pain shooting through my head. It took bed rest and continuous hot packs to get through the day while consulting Dr. Google for what my husband speculated was a case of exacerbated bone spurs and a sore neck.

  “It seems like the exertion of putting together your son’s trampoline has activated a genetic predisposition for osteoarthritis in your neck,” pronounced the rheumatologist I begrudgingly went to see.

  “What about this?” I asked and held out my hands.

  “Oh, we just call that old-lady hands.”

  As someone who loves being right, this was one time when it just plain sucked. I had just described how I’d single-handedly assembled a twelve-foot trampoline for my son, jumped on it for a few hours, and now couldn’t button my blouse. The Skywalker 2000 came unassembled with maybe ninety-odd pieces and presented an irresistible challenge because I pride myself on my prowess with a power tool. I have half-painted furniture and bedroom walls scarred by poorly executed attempts to mount pictures, but a self-contained project can be satisfying, even if done poorly. Following a set of rules is relaxing, an antidote to a career as a freelancer in which there is always more to be done. Perhaps women in earlier centuries felt that way about lacing up a corset; it gave shape to your day in addition to your waistline. It took me only three and a half hours of straining to fasten the springs into the frame, with only two hopefully unimportant screws and one large piece of metal tubing to spare.

  That first day, my son invited friends over and jumped for hours. When the boys left, I decided to give it a try. I had been warned that for anyone who has given birth and not done Kegels religiously—and by religiously, I mean continuously from the moment you give birth—leakage is to be expected. I hadn’t been on a trampoline in more than thirty years and in those first jumps, two sensations surged through my body: complete happiness and the jolt of something becoming dislodged internally. Thank goodness I had on dark jeans. I jumped for two exhilarating hours.

  Undressing that night, I found an even bigger surprise than I realized. It had taken only one day of trampolining to return my period to me. I’ve still got it, I told myself. I’m not really old yet. I could still have a baby. A baby with a one-in-ten chance of severe birth defects, but I could do it. Not that I wanted a baby, but I could still have one. Still fertile. Fuck you, fifty, I’m still young! The door that slammed shut with menopause had creaked back open.

  The sheer joy of jumping made me feel invincible. Having stumbled upon something so unexpected and fantastic, I went to sleep feeling that anything was possible. Our trampoline was, if not a fountain of youth, the closest thing to it you can purchase without a prescription. At least for the sum of three hundred dollars, which is only a hundred and ninety dollars more than an ounce of Hope in a Jar miracle moisturizing cream. Of course, I hadn’t figured in the cost of a doctor’s visit, and now this doctor was telling me I’d caused irreversible damage, and that could mean only one thing: staggeringly high medical bills.

  As Dr. Nudgey droned on, I considered which word was less sexy, “arthritis” or “rheumatology,” and decided it was a draw.

  Nudgey, I concluded, had the worst bedside manner in the world, when he added, “You’re my youngest patient.” Why the need to tell me that? At various points in my life I had hoped to be the youngest person to win an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Genius, but I never, ever wanted to be the youngest patient of a doctor who treats persons afflicted with aging-related diseases.* I was dabbing at my eyes as the doctor, who was ancient himself, told me that I should put it in perspective.

  “You don’t have pancreatic cancer.”

  “Yes, I know that,” I said without mentioning that my old-lady hands had recently helped one of my best friends with that exact disease to exit this world.

  “That’s one of the . . .”

  “Bad cancers,” I said, thin
king how nice it would be to have a numbing dosage of OxyContin right about now.

  “I have high blood pressure and a low-functioning thyroid; that’s worse, let me tell you.”

  Were we in a disease-off?

  Then he told me how his own mother tried to warn him of the horrors of aging, telling him, “You’ll see,” every time he questioned her lifestyle: “Mom, why don’t you get out of your bathrobe during the day?” “You’ll see.” “Mom, why don’t you take an exercise class?” “You’ll see.” He tells me there is really nothing I can do.

  “I’ve read about glucosamine and chondroitin. What about taking those?”

  “They don’t really work.”

  “Exercise?”

  “Doesn’t work.”

  “Changing my diet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Acupuncture?”

  “You can go ahead and spend money on that if you want to, but it doesn’t do any good.”

  I wanted to take my old-lady hands, put them around his neck and strangle him.

  Dr. Nudgey did suggest one course of action. “You can down fistfuls of aspirin, but that’s about it. There’s no cure, and it only gets worse.”

  That’s when the weeping began.

  He asked me if my mother had disfigured hands. “No,” I replied, but then I thought about my grandmother Frances. She’d had knobby fingers for as long as I could remember. I assumed this was the result of her meticulous cleaning. She washed the wallpaper in her dining room so often that the glue seeped through. When my cousins and I would slap our artwork and spelling tests against the wall, they stuck. She even had wheels put on her larger pieces of furniture to make polishing the floor easier.

  Just when I’d gotten used to the idea that my once smooth hands were becoming as veiny as my mother’s, I was going straight for gnarly grandma hands. Frances, whose character had been shaped by the Depression, never complained about pain in her hands, thus leaving me totally unprepared. I’d also used Frances’s hands as an excuse for my poor housekeeping skills, and now I’d have no excuse.*