Is That The Shirt You're Wearing

by Kristen Brakeman

  After a few months of having people talk to me in that “I’m so sorry” tone and having them insist that I must not have time for outside commitments like volunteering, I’ll confess that I started to take advantage of the situation myself. “Well, yes I am still available to work the pre-school auction, but I have to make sure it doesn’t conflict with my husband’s cancer doctor appointment. Oh, you don’t really need me there, after all? Are you sure?”

  Throughout what I now call “the information-gathering phase,” I continued my positive thinking mantra. The minute my husband expressed worry or started to relate a story about someone’s relative who died of prostate cancer, I would swoop in with an uplifting statistic like that the fifteen-year survival rate can be as high as 92%. I wouldn’t even let him finish a sentence if I sensed it wasn’t in line with my sunny approach.

  When it was finally time to pursue treatment, we met with three doctors, much like when we interviewed three contractors for our bathroom remodel. The first was a private practice surgeon who reminded us of a used-car salesman. After demanding to know what other options we were considering, he resorted to belittling his competition, “Oh, you don’t want to go to that place. It’s a factory. They won’t even know your name. With me you get personal follow-up service.” I half expected him to offer regular oil changes and complimentary floor mats. The second doctor, a specialist in radiation therapy, was so low-pressure I almost felt like he was trying to get rid of us. Maybe it was because of my husband’s relatively young age (only 50 at the time), but it seemed like he was pushing us out the door and into the hands of a surgeon.

  There were many facts to consider, but to make a decision we had to boil it down to the simplest terms. We surmised that radiation treatment could result in worse side effects down the line, whereas the surgery option would mean immediate pain and possibly a year of side effects, but hopefully full recovery eventually. We chose the surgery and brought our own rose colored glasses.

  The surgeon we selected worked at City of Hope cancer center. Not only had he performed thousands of radical prostatectomies (the robotic surgery to remove the prostate), he was the head of the department and perhaps more importantly he shared the last name of the oncologist character, Wilson, on the medical show House. Probably it’s not the most logical way of choosing one’s doctor, but something about his familiar, doctory-sounding name gave us confidence that he was the man for the job.

  We became pretty familiar with the City of Hope after a while, having made numerous trips for consultations and pre-op appointments. The grounds are simply beautiful, peaceful and serene, though you can’t walk two steps without seeing a metal donation nameplate, for they are affixed to virtually every tree, garden, walkway and fountain. I half expected to see them on the toilets in the bathroom.

  Finally it was the day of my husband’s surgery. He checked in as I held a bag of the prescribed post-surgery supplies: Depends, laxatives, multiple tubes of ointment, and a large rubber blowup ring. I was of course elected to purchase these items - for better, for worse.

  As we joined the somber looking people in the lobby of the Millie and Mike Hersch Family Surgical Center and waited for my husband’s name to be called, I was struck by a realization. The thing about a cancer center is that it’s not like a community hospital where you might encounter a happy family with a newborn, or a kid with a simple broken arm. Instead, everywhere is sadness. Everywhere you see bald women and children and frail teens in wheelchairs, people whose prognoses was surely not as good as my husband’s.

  But I was determined to not let the sadness in. I forced myself to look away, to remain detached, so I could continue to be the optimistic cheerleader for my husband, even though in the six months since his diagnosis, he had made it pretty clear that my sunny outlook was really getting on his nerves.

  As we waited I made happy small talk with him even though he didn’t want to participate. I purposely smiled at the other people waiting, trying to spread my “everything’s going to be fine” mentality to perfect strangers as well.

  My husband, needing a break from my Stepford-like cheeriness, got up to get a drink from the Samuel G. Weiss water fountain. As he walked back towards me I heard familiar music. My husband heard it too. We looked for its source and discovered that downstairs at the lobby entranceway a woman was strumming Sarah McLachlan’s mournful song, In The Arms of An Angel . . . on the harp. Really? A harp?

  My husband and I burst out laughing, not a sound people heard much at the City of Hope apparently, because we received quite a few shocked looks. But we couldn’t believe that someone working at a cancer hospital thought it would be a good idea to have a harpist play a song about death while people waited for their cancer surgeries.

  Inside the pre-op area, with my husband already in his hospital gown and hooked up to an IV, I continued my mission to keep things positive and distract him from the situation at hand. As we looked over the newspaper together, I suddenly had a keen interest in baseball news. I updated him on every fascinating tidbit of information about our children. I even thought of a great new fundraiser for the hospital. “I say lose the donation placards and sell t-shirts like the kind you buy at tourist traps. You know, ‘My Husband Had Cancer And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt.’ They’d make millions off those buggers!”

  By this point my husband was longing for the appearance of the anesthesiologist and the merciful silence the surgery would provide.

  The doctor appeared and the nurses eagerly jumped into action, readying for the move. I quickly leaned down to kiss my husband goodbye and assured him I would see him very soon. The fearful look in his eyes reminded me of my daughter’s when I had to leave her on the first day of kindergarten. Before I could say anything more, the nurses started wheeling the gurney down the hall. As they walked, they told me that the doctor would call when the surgery was finished.

  But then, the anesthesiologist stopped the gurney and called to me, “Wife! Here, you need to take his glasses.”

  I took them in my hand and walked away. I really had no idea where I should go. I only knew that I didn’t want to be in that depressing lobby. So I walked out of the surgical building and into the Wilt Family Garden where I took a seat alone on the Nathan and Ruth Diamond bench. As I sat, I realized my hand was still tightly clinched. I opened it and discovered my husband’s glasses in my palm.

  Strangely, I flashed on a memory of my parents, coming home from the veterinarian after they had put our elderly dog, Sandy, to sleep, and holding only her collar and leash as they walked into the living room.

  As I stared at the glasses, it hit me. Oh shit, my husband has cancer.

  It had been six months since his diagnosis, but it took being alone on that bench, holding his glasses to make me finally realize it.

  I cycled through a torrent of horrible “What ifs,” the ones my husband had already thought of a million times, the ones I had refused to consider or even let him discuss.

  I had been so busy trying to distract him from worrying and keeping him thinking positively, that I hadn’t allowed myself to really think about the situation. And now that I finally did, what I thought was, well, it sucked.

  But then, I realized something else, something more important. Since that day in the doctor’s office when my husband and I first learned he had prostate cancer, I had sucked.

  Instead of letting him talk about his fears, I had steamrolled right over them. I had treated him like I did my kids when they got a skinned knee, by trying to distract from any possible sadness with silliness or jokes. But he didn’t want or need distractions. And he didn’t need me to remind him of encouraging statistics every time he brought up a concern. He just needed me to listen.

  Finally, the call came from the surgeon. All had gone well and the cancerous tumors were now gone. The preliminary lab results had already come back and his cancer was upgraded, which is not a good thing like when you’re moved to first class; instead it meant that the ca
ncer cells were more aggressive. It was more serious than we both had thought.

  My husband was moved to a wing that housed all the prostatectomy patients. I sat by while he recovered from the anesthesia. The next morning, only one day after surgery, the nurse came in and announced that he needed to get up and start moving. She said that the healing would come faster with the more walking he did.

  It seemed counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t he rest and recover? But then we looked out his open door and saw a virtual parade of elderly gray-haired men briskly walking down the hallway, holding their IV trees and their wives for support, with their posteriors mostly exposed through their loosely tied hospital gowns.

  That was all it took. “I gotta get out there!” my husband announced, practically leaping out of his hospital bed. “I can’t let those old guys show me up.” Clearly his competitive instinct was still intact.

  He winced in pain as he took his first few steps, but he attacked the challenge. Maybe it was the pain killers, but something about him seemed different, like a cloud had been lifted. He was happier than he had seemed in months.

  Wearing his hospital gown, with his buttocks half hanging out, he should have appeared weaker and more sympathetic than ever. Instead he seemed stronger and in charge. The surgery had removed the alien invaders. Just knowing that they were gone seemed to make the difference.

  Over the following year there were to be good and bad days as he dealt with the two dreaded ‘I’s’: impotence and incontinence. They were not a surprise, but still his side effects were worse and more troubling than the “Pollyanna” me had predicted. During that time I would occasionally sneak in a “happy stat” to try to lift his spirits, but mostly I recalled my revelation on the bench and remembered to shut up and listen.

  In the three years since, he’s remained cancer-free and has been able to fully return to his previous energetic lifestyle. But, because the side effects have lingered, he occasionally has to use the assistance of modern medication, those magic pills you see advertised during football games. Oddly enough, whenever he takes those things he suddenly tries to convince me to take a ride on a motorcycle or take a bath together on a rooftop high rise.

  I still think the hospital could make a mint selling those t-shirts.

  4 weeks to go!

  That damn Iliad. It taunts me from the coffee table, so pristine and untouched. I told my daughter she could have one week to recover from summer school, but then she has to start reading in earnest.

  Chloe tells me that she can actually feel my stress waves. I don’t doubt that. I think whoever came up with the concept of summer reading, especially of books that cry out for a teacher’s interpretation, must not have enjoyed their own teenage years and want to make damn sure that no one else enjoys theirs either. This person should serve hard time in a prison somewhere where their only entertainment is a copy of the damn Iliad.

  Now that summer school is over we’ve started talking more seriously about the vacation. We begrudgingly gave up on our Yurt charade. We actually tried to book a yurt so that we could torture the kids with one night’s stay and then tell them afterwards that we were joking, but it turned out that all the yurts were booked up nine months ago. It seems these Yurters take their yurting seriously.

  So now we’re looking into a house rental at a Northern Californian lake, up in this volcanic-formed area near Mt. Lassen and Mt. Shasta. Peyton is scared of volcanoes so my husband thinks this will force her to face, and then get over, her fears. She’ll either realize that people can co-exist with volcanoes and we’ll have a great vacation or we’ll all go sleepless as she sits up at night waiting for imminent lava flow. I’m betting on the latter.

  Turns out this lake area is a lot cheaper than Lake Tahoe or any of the Southern Californian lakes. We made the mistake of telling this fact to our kids and now they’re certain that we’re going to a swimming hole populated by banjo-playing rednecks. My eldest daughter has told everyone we are vacationing at Lake Inferior. Ha ha, very funny, Chloe.

  Money didn’t used to be the driving force behind our vacation choices. Back when I worked more and we lived in a smaller house we vacationed at fancier digs. Then again, we used to eat at nice restaurants too. When we lived at our old house our mortgage payments seemed to get smaller over time compared to what we made. We assumed that the same thing would happen with this house. (Or maybe just I thought that?) Instead we seem to be living check to check now.

  For the first five years we were still optimistic that the money would eventually come so we made a lot of home improvements to our new house. We window-ed and door-ed and painted and carpeted and plumbed and electric-ed. Then, when a pool man accidentally dyed our swimming pool purple with some crazy-bad chemical combination, we had to resurface our pool. This led to redoing the cement decking, which led to redoing the irrigation, new plants, and ultimately a whole new backyard.

  Oddly enough, the backyard fence became the most time consuming and expensive feature. We wanted one that was visually pleasing, but could also withstand the 60 mph winds that we frequently get in our yard. So we had to hire an English wood craftsman for such a fence, one who would work with the care and love of an artist restoring the Sistine Chapel.

  Simon, our craftsman, arrived each day at the crack of dawn, say 10:30AM or so, and worked steadily until an exhausting 3:00PM. Oftentimes he would knock on the back door about quittin’ time and ask us to heat up water for his tea. A friend told us that in England it was customary to provide your workers with a spot of tea and a snack. We didn’t want to be gauche Americans so naturally we obliged. We’d set out a snack of traditional English foods like guacamole and tortilla chips and chat politely, hoping that our hospitality might encourage him to pick up the pace a wee bit. In hindsight, maybe tea and hookers would have been better.

  About the time Peyton started referring to our woodworker as Uncle Simon, our fence was finally complete. It was beautiful, as was our entire backyard. Today when I look at my yard I am filled with happiness, which is a good thing because we will be paying for that happy feeling for the next thirty years. When the kids mention their college plans I often point them in the direction of the back yard and say, “See the lovely pool and fence? That was your college fund!” Oh, how I howl with laughter at that. It never gets old.

  Since completing the yard five years ago, we’ve become decidedly more frugal. The hammer has come down. Our only elective house expense this year was paying the tooth-deficient Rusty the Rubbish man to haul away some oversized trash. As I wrote a check to him last week, Rusty felt inclined to show me pictures of his kids, grandkids and pets. Again wanting to be hospitable, I foolishly complimented a picture of Rusty’s cats. That’s when Rusty told me that one of those four cats had been urinating on his carpet. He volunteered that he had his cats euthanized one by one until he found the culprit. “Turned out it was the last cat that was doing it! Doesn’t that just figure?”

  Um, uh . . . yes?

  I guess life is like that sometimes, Rusty.

  Mother Versus Nature

  Two days after moving into our house, an exterminator knocked at our door. I had not called him. That’s never a good sign. Apparently the previous owners had failed to cancel their monthly service. This was how I found out that my family wouldn’t be the only creatures living at our hillside home.

  In the last eleven years we’ve encountered rattlesnakes, peacocks, coyotes, skunks, deer, foxes, even mountain lions. On the one hand, it’s sort of exciting to see nature up close, but on the other, like when I find mouse droppings in my pots and pans or a rat nest in the garage, nature up close can be rather gross.

  Upon my return home from work recently, I was greeted by nature up close once again. As I absent-mindedly opened the front door, I looked up to see that only a few inches from my face sat a giant, hairy tarantula, frighteningly close to being inside my home, where I sleep, where I previously felt safe, until this moment.

  I ran inside throu
gh a side door and alerted my family of the tarantula’s terrifying presence. For some reason, I used hushed tones, perhaps so he would not know we were on to him. My kids stared catatonically at the television while my husband stayed firmly seated, savoring his chocolate-chip cookie dough ice cream. They barely acknowledged me. My husband finally replied, “I’m not going out there. It’s your turn.”

  “I hardly think squashing a few ants in the bathroom counts as a turn,” I scoffed.

  It didn’t surprise me. I knew when we first married that I would be the resident spider assassin - it was in our vows - but this was ridiculous. I certainly didn’t sign on for tarantulas.

  The four-legged wildlife, the mice, the ants, the normal- sized spiders, all of them I have grown to tolerate, but this was too much nature for me. Shouldn’t they have listed tarantulas in the real estate disclosure?

  I remember my first encounter. It happened during our third summer here, when I was confident that I knew of all the lurking dangers. I was leaving the house with my two young daughters (and pregnant with our third) when my youngest matter-of-factly announced, “Mom, there’s a tarantula on the front door.”

  “Oh, right, sure,” I said in disbelief, knowing that kids can be prone to exaggeration. I assumed I would find just a really big house spider. But when I looked at the door, I was horrified to see that she was right. There, staring back at me was a huge, scary, hairy tarantula.

  I was as frightened as if it had been a charging rhinoceros.

  “Quick! Girls! Get in the car. Lock the doors!” I shouted.

  I ran to the garage to search for, I don’t know what, some kind of tarantula removing device. I came out with a large push broom.