It's Not About the Hair: And Other Certainties of Life & Cancer

by Debra Jarvis

  However, before I went to chemo, in my grogged-out state, I called my parents to say hi. They were not home so I left a message. On the message, I said it was Friday (it was Thursday) and I sounded as if I’d been run over several times by a garbage truck—or so I’m told. Because you see, after the traditional IV cocktail of two fingers Fentanyl, a splash of Versed, and a twist of lemon, I remember nothing.

  The next morning my mother called and left a message in what my sister and I call her “panic voice.”

  “Debbie Lynn?” she said. “This is Mom. Call me.”

  I heard this and said to Wes. “Oh, my God. Something’s happened. Somebody died. I’d better call her right now.”

  Mom: “Hello?”

  Me: “Hi, Mom, it’s me. How are you?”

  Mom: “I’m fine, but how are you?”

  Me: “I’m fine, but really, Mom, how are you?”

  Mom: (starting to get annoyed) “I’m fine! We got your message.”

  Me: “What message?”

  And that’s the beauty of anesthesia.

  So I’m done with procedures for a while, and it’s going well, except for the teeny-tiny meltdown I had a few weeks ago. It was mainly tears and an inability to walk down the hall into my room for chemo. I believe my exact words were, “I don’t want to do this anymore!”

  I was feeling quite tragic, but I’m afraid I just sounded squeaky and whiny. (Good hamster names!) It was brought on mostly by lack of sleep and learning about the staff support group called, “Caring for Our Own.”

  The support is, as Martha Stewart says, “a good thing,” and I’m proud to work in a place that cares so much about their employees. But knowing that I was one of “Our Own” caused me all kinds of irrational guilt. (It was so easy to make it all about me!) I know that this is crazy. It is like apologizing for causing my mother’s labor pains. But perhaps that’s why they invented Mother’s Day. Or is it Labor Day?

  Global Warming Department: What is the mystery behind this? I know exactly what’s causing global warming: the female baby boomers are all in menopause. There are enough hot flashes around to melt the polar ice caps, boil the Arctic Ocean, and then make tea. Two weeks ago I awoke and wondered why the smoke alarm had not gone off, because surely the house was on fire. Silly me. It was just as my oncologist had promised: abrupt menopause.

  The worst is not the hot flash, but the insomnia that follows. I’m so awake and alert I could hear a dog fart in Afghanistan. So in addition to the usual sleeping meds (mallet on the head, shot of tequila) I do what I often suggest patients do when they can’t sleep: I pray. So just know that at some point, everyone getting this update has been prayed for.

  My prayer is short, from the Buddhist tradition, and covers all the bases. “May you be healed. May you be blessed. May you have peace.” I figure everyone I know could do with a little more healing, blessings, and peace. And by the time I’ve prayed for friends, neighbors, colleagues, pets, foreign countries, writers, movie stars, and politicians, I’m asleep—or it’s time to get up.

  So let me just say here, many thanks for your love and support. I’m happy to pray for you all.

  Love and Hugs,

  Debra

  Global Warming

  A hot flash is not like being in an overheated room or sitting in the sun. Nor is it a flash, like lightening, over in a split second. Believe me, that would be preferable. This is how it is at night: I am suddenly awake. Not the kind of startled awake from a sudden sound where your heart is pounding and you’re listening hard. No, I am suddenly awake as if I were in the middle of a job interview, my mind totally engaged and alert.

  I think,“Hmm, why am I awake? Oh, yeah, I’m about to have a hot flash. But first—the cold flash!” A wave of goose bumps travels from my ankles all the way up to my scalp culminating in a giant shiver.Then pressure builds in my skull and radiates to my face. My ears start burning and turn bright red. It’s a miracle my hair doesn’t go up in flames.

  My core feels as if there is a nuclear bomb going off, which makes my chest, stomach, and back heat up to approximately 350 degrees Fahrenheit.You can easily melt cheese slices on my belly. My crotch feels as if someone has planted a Bunsen burner between my legs. Then I start sweating like Seabiscuit coming down the stretch. Impressive really.

  Over a period of two weeks I went from thinking “How fascinating” to “This sucks!” and then back to “How fascinating.” Getting mad was no good, because it kept me awake longer.

  I sought advice from one of my patients.

  “The moment you wake up, get up and pee. That way you are already out of that hot bed when the heat comes on. Of course it helps tremendously to be bald. Getting your head cool is paramount.” She gave me a pitying look. “But you have all that hair.”

  It was the first time anyone ever felt sorry for me for not losing all my hair.

  I had never in my life had insomnia—not really. A sleepless night here and there, but this was different. Night after night of being awake three to four hours. Plenty of time to go over my entire life and reflect on how things were or how I thought they should be. Which brings me to my family of origin.

  Letting People off My Hook

  When my sister visited just after my surgery, the three of us went to see the movie Millions. In it there is a scene where the little boy is talking to his dead mother. She says to him, “Have faith in people. It makes them strong.”

  I took that as a sign from Mr. Martha Miyagi to have faith my sister and my parents would reconcile.“Have faith in Lynie,” I told myself. “It will make her strong. Have faith in Mom and Dad. It will make them strong.”

  It was important to me before, but now it felt absolutely essential that my family be intact. Why is this? When you get cancer you very quickly learn the important things in life are not things at all, but relationships.The job, the car, the house, and everything in it are nothing compared to who will come and hold your hand. Who will listen to you? Who will bring you soup?

  My relationships were precious to me, especially my family, and I wanted everyone to be together.

  I had hoped my mom’s cancer diagnosis and then my diagnosis would somehow heal the estrangement between my parents and my sister. It seemed like perfect timing because everyone was feeling vulnerable and emotional, and I was sure everything would be forgiven. I couldn’t be with my mom for her surgery, so one scenario was my Dad would call Lynie and ask her to come down and be with them. My other dream was that Lynie would call them and say, “Mom and Dad, let’s just forget the past. I’m here for you now.”

  But my perfect little scene was complicated by the fact that Paul, Lynie’s son, had an emergency appendectomy. Who should she be with: her seventeen-year-old son, her sister having a mastectomy, or her mother who she hadn’t been close to in sixteen years? Of course she chose her son. I would have, too.

  Often a life-threatening illness brings people back together. I was talking to a young woman whose mother was coming in for chemotherapy. The daughter was seventeen, very bright, and her mother had had breast cancer since Kaylie was ten. Her parents divorced before she was born.

  “It was always a big tense thing with my parents, me going back and forth. My mom would get mad, and then my dad would get mad. But when my mom was diagnosed, everything changed overnight. It was totally weird.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, it used to be if one of them wanted me for an extra day it was a ‘concession.’ That’s all I heard from both of them, ‘I’m making so many concessions to your mother,’ or ‘to your father.’ And then when mom got cancer, it was no longer a concession. It was just the way we did things. Everybody just chilled. They were both more relaxed with each other.”

  “How do you explain that?” I thought perhaps she could let me in on the secret.

  “I think they finally got that life is short, and they were being stupid. I mean, they did really love each other at some point, and I think they reme
mbered that.”

  I had seen this kind of thing happen when I worked in hospice. Children who have been estranged for years find out their parent is dying, and they suddenly show up. They get reacquainted with their parent and find to their amazement they actually like them after all. The reconciliation is joyful but also bittersweet.

  That is what I wanted for my family: a joyful but bittersweet reunion. So while I lay awake at night after a hot flash, I would think about this and pray. Well, I’m not really sure if this was prayer or just plain fantasizing.

  I saw us having Thanksgiving dinner together at Lynie’s house. My parents had never seen her house. I thought maybe being on her home turf would be more comfortable for Lynie than returning to our ancestral ranch-style house in the Silicon Valley. Besides, she had a bigger dining room.

  There we would be cooking in the kitchen, my mom, my sister, and I. The men would be watching football in the living room—except Wes would keep coming in to see if we needed any help because that’s the kind of guy he is. My niece would be late because she always is. My nephew would be watching the game too, but quietly because he is a man of few words.

  We’d all be jolly in the kitchen, sipping champagne between chopping onions and toasting pecans. Lynie would run out and look at the TV every so often because she is a big football fan.The guys would be cheering in the living room, and we women would start to get a little tense wondering if some people were drinking too much champagne.

  But we’d keep on chopping and toasting, and then Mom would say, “I don’t chop like that. I chop like this.” Lynie and I would exchange looks, and things would get a little tenser.

  Then there would be a roar from the living room, and Dad would be bellowing at the defense or the coach or the quarterback. Wes and my brother-in-law, Dan, would be calming him down. Then Wes would come in the kitchen and beg to do the dishes, and we would all feel even tenser and decide that no one was getting any more champagne, and maybe we shouldn’t have wine with dinner. Then there would be an argument about who was being a hard head and who was not.

  When I got to that point in my prayer/fantasy I’d move on to the next holiday.

  The problem was that I ran out of holidays, and I came to the realization that families are complicated and crazy and sometimes unlikable, but that’s what families are. No matter how much I fantasized, it was never going to be perfect.

  All those photos in Sunset magazine of families cooking together don’t show the teenage daughter flipping off her mother. They don’t explain the reason the father has a shaved head is because he’s thinking of leaving his family and becoming a Buddhist monk. They don’t show the aunt using her inhaler because she’s allergic to the gorgeous Bernese mountain dog in the photo who not only has worms, but regularly humps the Barcalounger.

  No, families aren’t perfect and neither is life, or why would I be lying awake from a chemo-induced hot flash?

  After several nights of this I was a wreck. My sister called one afternoon not knowing what a mental case I was. So when she innocently asked me how I was feeling, I answered,“I’m so sad you and Mom and Dad still don’t speak, and I’m afraid they’re going to die, and it will be too late. I hoped having cancer would make you see how important family is, and they’re your parents and they’re sad, too. I don’t want to have to die to make you see that.”

  I said all that in one breath, but I was crying at the end. There was a big pause and then Lynie said, “It sounds like you’re having a bad day.”

  She was right about that. She was also correct in realizing I was making my sadness her problem. It wasn’t. It was my problem. I’d fallen into that whole trap of,“If only X would do Y, then I’d be happy.”

  She was also smart not to engage me in this conversation. In the past we’d try to talk about it, and she’d said different things like, “I’ll take that under consideration,” which is like taking the Watchtower from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and throwing it in the recycling bin while they’re watching. One time she said, “It’s not up to you.”

  It was the one subject we couldn’t talk about. I had both a burning desire and absolute fear of bringing it up. I love my sister like no other, and I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize our relationship. But not talking about it created a distance between us. I wondered if there would ever be a step toward reconciliation, and who would take it.

  The thing that made it hard for me was in recent years, Wes and I really did have fun with my parents. They didn’t drive me crazy like they used to. They had changed, but so had we. I no longer made them drink Peet’s coffee when they visited. I brewed Yuban. When we visited, they brewed Yuban really strong for us and diluted theirs. They hadn’t achieved perfection or anything—my God, my dad is still a Republican, and Mom adores the paintings of Thomas Kinkade.

  I consulted Jesus about this. He’s really such a hippie. All I heard from him was, “Love them and chill out.”

  Searching scripture for Jesus’s behavior toward his own parents, I came up with him being rude to his mother at a wedding. She tells him the hosts have run out of wine. Different translations have him saying, “What have I to do with thee?” “What has that to do with us?” “Why do you involve me?” In other words,“Why are you telling me?” As if she had said, “Oy vey, Jesus, here we are with no wine. Do something!”

  What about the Ten Commandments? “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.” My sister is a Christian, but I knew that quoting scripture to her wouldn’t make her do what I wanted.

  I consulted Gloria, one of my long-time patients. She had been living with cancer for fifteen years. She also had a son who didn’t speak to her.

  “Debra,” she said. “You pray about this, and then you let it go, my darling.You can no more make people do what you want than God can make us do what He wants. We’re provided the opportunity, that’s all. I’ve apologized to my son, but he just can’t forgive me.”

  “But you’re his mom.”

  “I know that!” she said impatiently. “But I can’t make him forgive me. You’re being thick-headed here. Just because you have cancer doesn’t mean you get everything your way.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s worked well for other things.”

  “Well, it’s not going to work for this. And you’d be wise to stop spreading that ‘do I have to die?’ manure.”

  I hated that she was right.

  Wedding Break

  As the months went by I bagged out on more social plans because I was just too tired. But I had made one I had no intention of breaking, for it is a rare and wonderful thing for a babysitter to officiate at the wedding of a babysittee.

  In my last two years at UC Berkeley, my girlfriends and I moved up into the Berkeley hills to live in the house of a professor on sabbatical.We had no idea we had moved into a neighborhood of young families. All we cared about was that the rent was a good deal and the view was gorgeous. All the neighbors cared about was that we were five female college students—babysitter jackpot!

  My friends and I moved in one morning and by that afternoon, two people had already knocked on our door to ask if we could babysit that weekend. They had that crazed, desperate look in their eyes I would later come to recognize in my own friends.

  The Thomsons were my favorite customers because: (1) they had a pool, (2) they had a grand piano, (3) they had a dog (a cairn terrier like Max), (4) they had Peet’s coffee, (5) they had a great view of San Francisco, and most importantly, (6) they had three great kids, Heather, Colin, and Alison.

  Colin was the soloist at our wedding and now twenty years later, I was the minister at his. The entire family was very sweet and said they understood if I couldn’t come because I was on chemo. But there was no way I was going to miss this.

  We flew down to Berkeley on the weekend, and the wedding was held on a Monday. This is traditionally the dark night at the theater, and because Colin and Karen are both actors
and singers, as were many of their friends, this was a sensible thing to do. It was also great for me because I got chemo on Thursday, and I was just starting to perk up on Monday.

  I had forgotten how Berkeley could be cool and cloudy in the morning, and then the sun breaks out around 11 a.m. and it’s glorious. We hiked up the Strawberry Canyon Fire Trail and walked in Tilden Park. The change of scenery recharged me. Even the air was different, drier and smelling of eucalyptus. I realized in the six weeks I’d been on chemo, I’d allowed my life to become mostly work and chemo. This trip reminded me there is more life out there, and other people are having big important things happen to them—like getting married.