Lost in the Reflecting Pool

by Diane Pomerantz

  I was discharged from the hospital on Sunday, and the healing workshop was the next day. When an older woman in the group began to share, tears stained her face and her voice cracked as soon as she started speaking.

  “My daughter is dying. She’s only thirty-eight, and she has three babies under five.” Her pain oozed within me like blood from an open wound. “We thought she had beaten it. They found the first lump in her breast five years ago, right after my granddaughter was born. Now it’s everywhere in her body. She is going to die, and her babies will be without a mother. My baby . . .”

  My own sobs were deep; I could not restrain them as she spoke. Her anguish was my anguish. I left the group, my breath tight in my chest. I drove to pick up my children from school, feeling dazed. The February sky was flat and lifeless. I began to climb the long stone stairway, and then it simply occurred to me, without fanfare or drumbeats, I will do the transplant. I knew I had made my decision. I knew the path to take. I knew that even if it ultimately made no real difference in the outcome of my disease, I wouldn’t look back and say, “If only I had gone through with the transplant.” Elisabeth and Sam deserved to have every possible chance of having their mother alive.

  I called Charles and told him that I had made my decision. Part of me hoped he would be as relieved as I was; I couldn’t fathom that he would not want what was best for me. I hoped he wanted me to be alive above all else.

  The answer to those hopes came several nights later. Arriving home late from his DC office, Charles told me he wanted to share something with me. I could tell that it was not just going to be a casual conversation. By this time, his sharing most anything with me, amid his alternating remoteness and disdain, was unusual.

  “As I was driving home just now, I passed a bad accident on I-83. It looked like it was fatal.” Pausing, he then continued, “I began to think that if I were to die tonight, it would be okay. I wouldn’t want anything extraordinary done to keep me alive. The children would be financially secure; there’s plenty of life insurance; they had a good start in life. It would be okay.”

  I said nothing. I knew from the silence that followed that there was a message I was supposed to hear in this. At that moment, I heard that message not only subliminally but also in my heart and in the not-so-deep recesses of my mind. I knew he was telling me that I, too, should be ready to die. He was telling me that the children would be fine, and that there should be no extraordinary attempts to save my life—in other words, I should not do the transplant. My life insurance would leave the children financially secure.

  How strange, how bizarre, how terrifying—this was the man I shared my life with, and he didn’t think my life was that important for him or our children. Over the years, I had worked with so many people who had lost a parent to death during childhood. It had never been anything less than traumatic, no matter what the age of the child or the circumstances of the death. He didn’t understand that.

  At that moment, I saw it clearly. For years, I had thought and felt that much of what Charles said and did was “crazy-making.” Never had I thought he was actually crazy. Suddenly, I knew, really knew, that his functioning had deteriorated. As much as I still longed to believe that he was “normal,” I wanted a way to explain the last twenty years of my life. Nevertheless, the truth was there.

  Chapter Seventeen

  CHARLES’S OBSESSION WITH FINANCIAL DISASTER WAS increasing. It made no sense, but I couldn’t allow myself, and didn’t have the energy, to get caught up in it; my focus was on survival and my children. Against our accountant’s advice, Charles insisted that we file for bankruptcy, get out of debt. If we couldn’t sell the house, we should just return it to the bank, move to a rental, and have the children start in public schools. Charles had always handled all of our money on his own; I had no reason to believe that he wasn’t being realistic about our financial stability. And, given my health, I had too many other things on my mind to read between the lines, so I didn’t think there was anything manipulative about what he was suggesting; I just thought he was exhibiting his usual craziness. So when he told me he wanted to move by the summer, I said simply, “How can I do that? I’ll be in treatment until August. I don’t have what it takes to pack up this entire house, to go through such a major change while I’m going through all this.”

  “Get your friends to help,” he said. “They’re willing to do anything for you, let them pack.”

  He was so envious of the support I got from my friends, the extent of it so great precisely because everyone else could see how little I got from him.

  Eventually, I did agree to the move. Although I was in the middle of chemotherapy, about to have a stem cell transplant, he kept telling me that we would work on our relationship as soon as treatment ended, and I so wanted to believe him—I so wanted our financial life to be stable so we could resume our life as a family. At that moment in time I could not conceive of the end of my marriage, despite what I was already beginning to see.

  One night, around the same time he began to talk about the move and bankruptcy, Charles asked me to check if he had gotten a particular e-mail. I logged in to his account and happened to see several messages from a patient whose name I recognized, Marissa. I recognized her name because she occasionally called on our shared business line at home and I had taken several of the calls. Her voice was distinctive, to say the least: deep, husky, and gruff, with something tough and aggressive about it that contrasted starkly with her ultra-feminine name. Once, after I’d taken a call from her, I had asked Charles if she looked anything like she sounded. He’d laughed and said, “Yes.”

  I don’t know why I did it—call it intuition—but when I saw several e-mails from Marissa, I opened one. I was shocked to see a note talking about an upcoming lunch date and signed, x-o-x, Marissa.

  It seemed a little adolescent, and certainly very troubling. Marissa’s excitement about their meeting for lunch was clearly filled with titillating energy. For several days, I said nothing to Charles about having seen the e-mails. But I was worried. Not only was he betraying me, although I didn’t think it was sexual at that time, but he was involved with a patient. He was putting our family at terrible risk. I finally confronted him, and he said, “I need someone to talk to. I can’t talk to you. She has a lot of the same interests I have; she’s a psychic, and she’s interested in astrology and UFOs.”

  “You can talk to me. And if you don’t want to, at least find people who aren’t your patients; if you need a therapist, get a therapist,” I told him. “Having lunch with patients is putting yourself and all of us at terrible risk. Promise me you’ll end this relationship with this woman, Charles,” I pleaded.

  Charles said nothing and walked into the other room.

  At my next session with Dr. Putman, I told her about what happened and she gave me an ethics brochure from the American Psychiatric Association. I hoped that Charles and I could discuss it rationally. I had left it somewhere on my desk, and then I went into the hospital for a weekend preliminary mobilization chemotherapy prior to my stem cell transplant.

  It was late on a Friday night, and I was already asleep in my hospital room, the poisonous drugs dripping through the IV as I slept. The phone startled me awake, and when I picked it up, Charles was raging. He had somehow found the ethics brochure on my desk and was furious.

  “How dare you, you bitch! You don’t trust that I know what I’m doing. . . .”

  On and on he went. I sat in the bed, tears rolling down my face. When the nurse walked in, I threw up.

  I returned home on Sunday. Charles reluctantly said he would end the relationship with Marissa; he did not. Every once in a while, I would check and saw that the e-mails continued. Now, though, they just weren’t signed x-o-x; in addition to talk of alien abductions and UFOs, astrological and psychic readings, Marissa spoke of my being evil and wrong for Charles, a malignant force in his life, and of his great gifts, compassion, brilliance. Her own psychic intuition told her that if
I chose to have the stem cell transplant, Charles must disengage completely and I must go through it alone.

  It was also around this time that I had my first contact with Victoria. It was very early on a Thursday morning, not long before I was to go into the hospital for the transplant. Charles was in the shower, preparing to spend the day in his DC office, when the business line rang. Rather than letting the machine answer, as I usually did, I picked it up. It was a woman, Victoria, a patient, she said, and she wanted to know if Charles was going to be driving the truck that day because she planned on bringing him the large plants she had promised him. I gave the message to Charles, he told me to tell her that he was driving the truck, and that was the end of it. Charles would later tell me that it was not Victoria who called, not Victoria who had given him the plants, and that I was again delusional.

  Two months after I was out of the hospital after my transplant, I would see an e-mail to Charles from Victoria—one of what would turn out to be many “good-bye” letters—and it ended with remember to bathe the plants. Charles’s response to that letter began, My dearest soul mate . . .

  The name was indelibly imprinted in my memory; it was Victoria. Nevertheless, I would for a time question myself about whether I was wrong about it.

  How could I have been so stupid? It was all there, for so long, and I still believed Charles and I would work on our relationship when my treatment ended—or did I? Two weeks before the transplant, I said to Dr. Putman, “The dilemma is, can I stay in this relationship, unloved, for the children and stay physically healthy?”

  “Can you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Or maybe I do know but am afraid to know. He’s never even met the doctors who are doing the transplant. You would think that, especially being a doctor, he would want to meet them, have questions for them, but nothing!” The intensity of my voice said it all.

  During all my research about stem cell transplants for breast cancer, I discovered a seminal research study that would determine whether funding for transplants for breast cancer would continue. The hospital room was dark, the temperature chilly, as I sat on a hard mattress, atop a crisp white sheet, with a needle in my arm. Tubing ran from my arm to an IV pole holding a bag of dark red plasma cells, dripping silently into my body. All of this was in preparation for my high-dose chemotherapy and stem cell rescue, which would begin a few days later.

  I drank a chocolate milk shake, an indulgence I gave in to these days, as I half listened to the news on CNN while playing Scrabble online on my laptop. I stopped when I heard the broadcaster say that the findings on this research study were in and were not positive. There was no difference in survival rates for those who had had the transplant and those who had not.

  I did not waver, though, in my decision to go through with the procedure, and I never mentioned this to Charles when he picked me up after the transfusion. I was not going to change my mind. He would just use the information to badger me.

  Several days before I was to be admitted to the hospital, I had to go in for the stem cells to be harvested. I had already had the surgery for a central line to replace the port through which I got my regular chemotherapy treatments. I was told it was a relatively minor procedure, that I would just be lying in a bed, hooked up to a dialysis-like machine. They would turn the machine on, and about four hours later, they would have separated out the stem cells and I would be free to go. If they were able to harvest enough cells, that would be it. Oftentimes, though, people did have to come back the next day.

  Even knowing it was a minor procedure, and having been through so much already, I was scared. Charles didn’t offer to go with me, nor did he say anything to me as I left the house for the hospital early in the morning. When I arrived at the unit, the nurses had a huge tray of donuts, pastries, and drinks for the three of us who were there for harvesting. The two other patients, one man and one woman, both with leukemia, were there with their spouses.

  “Is anyone here with you?” the nurse asked. I could tell she had noticed I was wearing my wedding ring.

  “No, only me today.” I laughed and shrugged as if other days were different, but beneath the numbness and fear, I felt alone, abandoned. I knew I could do it on my own, I was capable of it, but, damn it, why couldn’t my husband be with me, just like these others had their partners with them?

  The man in the bed on my left was there for his fourth try. He was not able to produce enough stem cells for the transplant. We laughed as I told him I promised if I had any extras, he could certainly have some. In about two hours, it was clear that I had produced an enormous number of stem cells. I was free to leave. I felt as if this were an omen telling me that I would be fine, I would come through the transplant, and I would survive.

  I flew down the nine flights of stairs to the hospital lobby, ran to the pay phone, and called Charles at the office across town. When he answered, I said, “Charles, you won’t believe how many stem cells they got. It will be okay—I know it!”

  Silence. Nothing.

  “Charles, are you there?”

  “Listen, Di, I’m really busy right now.” Click.

  I stood frozen in my body. Whatever elation and hope I had felt just moments before gave way to anguished paralysis. I walked, deadened, to the underground parking garage, feeling the dark, cold, damp stone reverberating with my every labored breath.

  The transplant was ultimately a non-event compared with the black hole that I had imagined it would be, though that isn’t to say it was easy. The first two days of my hospitalization, I received massive doses of chemotherapy, doses much higher than regularly administered, high enough to destroy all the cells within my body, high enough to kill me, leaving me with no immune system, no blood counts, whatsoever. The stem cells were to rescue me from death. On the third day, those harvested stem cells were injected back into my body with a very simple and anticlimactic syringe. The whole procedure took fifteen minutes, during which the cells had to be administered very slowly so as not to throw my body into a state of shock or, worse, death.

  Charles was not there. He did visit, but I don’t recall his ever asking anything about the procedures. By day two of the chemotherapy, my appetite began to wane; by day three, as my blood counts dropped, I had severe nausea and vomiting, and eating was no longer an option. I was started on intravenous feedings. The inside of my mouth and throat became swollen and unbearably painful. Friends brought me ice pops and puddings, hoping I could tolerate something, but I couldn’t.

  Once the doctors finally found the right combination of medications to help relieve my pain and nausea and vomiting, I became confused and disoriented, delirious. I didn’t know what time of day it was, or whether it was day or night. In my confusion, I pulled the central line out of my chest. All I recall is the fast-rolling gurney flying through a pale green tunnel and the swinging doors of the OR as they rushed me back to surgery for the line to be reinserted. I felt crazed and delirious, I was trapped within my mind and I could not escape.

  I wrote in my journal at some point, in a very tremulous hand:

  I wake up and before me is a magnificent table of mahogany and cherry carved woods. Perhaps it is not a table. . . . There are huge candles and hanging crystals. . . . Perhaps it is a coffin . . . perhaps my own.

  I was like that for fourteen days, and then, although a bit of nausea and vomiting remained, and though I was still terribly constipated from the drugs, which was the worst part of all, my blood counts returned to normal.

  On night fifteen, my grandfather visited again.

  By day eighteen, I was ready to be discharged. By all standards, I had come through it very quickly. It was a Saturday, and, as had become the custom, my father, not Charles, was the one who came to take me home.

  After the transplant, I didn’t return to work. First, I would undergo a period of recovery: four more cycles of chemotherapy and thirty radiation treatments. I planned on returning to work when the children went back to school, new schools
, in September. Since I had closed my practice, I would have to rebuild it almost from scratch.

  Strangely, Charles didn’t want to hire help when I went into the hospital or during my recovery. He still thought my friends ought to “pitch in,” do it for us. He never realized that they had lives of their own; he was always more than willing to take a handout—a characteristic I was becoming increasingly aware of. Despite his objections, we did get some at-home assistance while I was in the hospital, and Camille was wonderful. She was organized and nurturing, she loved the children, and without her, along with friends who came regularly, I couldn’t have gotten our house packed for the move.

  However, I still can’t believe I agreed to move in the first place. Only a crazy person would have consented to such a thing. I would pack for a few hours, take a nap, and then continue to pack for a few more hours—all this while I was still in treatment and in terrible gastric distress. I hadn’t shit in weeks! Again, it was never right, according to Charles. If I said I hadn’t taken a nap during the day, he would complain that I wasn’t taking care of myself. If I said I was particularly tired and had slept for several hours, he would complain that I wasn’t doing enough for the move, that he was doing everything. The truth was that, other than working, which was decreasing, he wasn’t doing much besides complaining about me and what I wasn’t doing. Not for another two months would I begin to suspect increasingly that he was sneaking out of the office to rendezvous with Victoria.