Life Unbothered

by Charlie Elliott

  “It seems you are recovering well from surgery,” Dr. So said in a clinical manner, with a distinct but not too heavy accent.

  As he moved away from the bed, a button on his white coat snagged on one of Sophia’s IV tubes, producing a tugging motion on her right arm. She winced and exhaled as the needle moved in her flesh. Dr. So whisked the front of his coat to loosen the stuck button and made his way back to the foot of the bed.

  “Let me go over what we found during the operation and the analysis of the tumor.” Dr. So ever so slightly rolled his head over to me as to infer I was included in the discussion. “You have a mucinous cystadenocarcinoma of the ovary. We gave you a hysterectomy and removed as much mass as we could. We did not perform a colostomy as per your instructions before the surgery. We only went after the tumorous mass.”

  Dr. So was getting ready to speak again when I interjected.

  “How large was the tumor?”

  “About the size of… a volleyball,” he said with no expression except for a little twinkle in his eyes, perhaps proud of his analogy any non-medical person could understand. My jaw gaped while I imagined the doctors trying to free as many pieces of that thing growing inside her. As I gazed at the elongated scar, Dr. Hieri draped the gown back over Sophia’s uncovered body.

  “In plain terms, you have ovarian cancer with metastases, meaning it has spread to other parts of your body,” Dr. So said.

  “Is it in her lymph system?” I asked. Not knowing a whole lot about cancer, the lymph system was one of the few ways I had heard cancer spreads throughout the body.

  Dr. So shifted his eyes to mine without moving his head, “It is most likely. The tumor was analyzed in the lab last night and determined to be Stage 3C, which means it is quite advanced.”

  Sophia remained motionless on the bed as Dr. Hieri made the finishing adjustments to her gown.

  “This tumor was caught too late. Cancer spreads fast in a young person like you,” Dr. So said. “You are how old?”

  “Twenty-eight,” Sophia mumbled.

  Dr. So produced a subtle nod of sympathy. His narrow eyes grew round beneath his thick, black-rimmed glasses as he checked off a sheet on his clipboard marking the topics reviewed.

  “Your… prognosis is poor and condition viewed as terminal.”

  Sophia’s smooth olive skin paled to a light greenish tinge. “Am I going to die?” she struggled to ask, her throat still sore from the tube running down her esophagus.

  “Not necessarily. We estimated a ten percent survival rate.”

  Sophia’s head whipped back.

  “Ten percent?” I responded, as a fierce rush of blood propelled to my head. “What does that mean?”

  “There is a cancer survival rate scale based on a five-year life expectancy.” Dr. So began his explanation as if he were reading from a textbook. “If a person lives for more than five years after diagnosed with cancer, they are considered as having survived, or beaten cancer. We assign a percentage value on the probability a person will live more than five years. From the stage of Sophia’s cancer, we believe there is a ten percent chance she will live for five years.”

  “So how long does she have to live?” The fear turned my voice combative. Dr. So sensed my rush of frustration yet he remained composed.

  “We do not know. That is why we use percentages. There is no way to tell, in time terms, how long. It could be a month, it could be years.”

  “What else can we do?” I asked.

  “Due to the advanced stage coupled with the financial difficulties due to lack of insurance, there is not much more we can do here at this hospital.”

  I stared at Dr. So, trying to keep myself from lashing out at him. “A lack of insurance, that’s what this is about?”

  Dr. So bowed his head slightly. “No. It has to do primarily with the terminal nature of her condition. We considered chemotherapy but decided against it solely for medical reasons, not financial reasons. Having insurance would not produce a more positive outcome in this case. Her terminal condition is best taken care of in the comfort of her own home. After she is released and we remove her stitches, we will examine her as needed.”

  I rolled my eyes in disbelief as both doctors headed out the door.

  “We will check on you at the end of the day,” Dr. Hieri said. She led the way out of the room with Dr. So behind her as they continued their rounds.

  I moved up against the bed and caressed Sophia’s left cheek. I felt great pain for her. Any future we could have possibly made together was halted abruptly, replaced by a dim path of uncertainty. Our hands met as I leaned over the bedrail to give her a long kiss. From the dismal diagnosis and Sophia’s reaction, I knew my attitude had to change, shift over to the productive side. I now had to be strong for Sophia, instead of the other way around—the way our relationship had been up to this point.

  “I don’t want to die,” she said.

  “Then fight the cancer.”

  “How?” Sophia asked in a voice noticeably dusted with desperation, though she tried to hold back the emotion. “You heard the diagnosis.”

  Sophia was a realist at her core. A well-defined technical answer to the question of ‘how to fight’ was hard to grasp, or even believe a valid solution may be within reach. There was always hope, and that was all I could relay at the moment.

  “Honey, you’ll have to reach deep down and dedicate your energy to fulfilling life while fighting the effects of the cancer. Before I met you I had basically forgotten how to live, but now I know the parade won’t just come through your living room. You’ve got to go out to the street to experience it, not wait for the parade to come to you.”

  “Do you still love me?”

  “Of course I still love you.” My hand clenched firmly in hers.

  “I want to live.” Her eyes glistened with fresh tears. “I want to go to the parade.”

  25. The Change

  Following Sophia’s operation in August, our lives changed instantaneously. Halloween gave way to Thanksgiving, and Christmas was approaching at a rapid pace, casting a surreal atmosphere on the holiday season. My life became concentrated on performing two tasks: going to work, and spending time with Sophia. Though students were still on summer break during her operation, she quit her teacher’s assistant job shortly after the surgery. We tried one more weekend trip in September, a visit to the desert, but the excitement and motivation was gone in our drives, the shadow of cancer cast a wide emotional net that outweighed my resolve. After that, the excursions abruptly ceased; my ambition shifted from boundary expansion to comforting the life of someone I loved. The first two months after surgery Sophia would run some errands and get out when she felt well enough to do so. By the end of October, she stopped leaving the apartment altogether while most of her time was devoted to resting as her condition worsened. Sophia and I now found both of us, as a couple, grounded by a physical disease. One measurable in scale, defined features and outcome, as opposed to the nebulous fragments of mental ailments that prodded Sophia to get me out and travel in the first place.

  Yet despite the grim physical realities, Sophia took her downcast frustration in pragmatic stride for as long as she could. There would be no miracle cures, no religious conversion, no fancy vitamin regimens, nor did she subscribe to exotic holistic remedies despite the overemphasized healing claims. Studying the hundreds of alternative options from around the world, Sophia remained realistic on living the life she was given, coupled with the advanced stage of her disease, as a more rational personal option over dwelling on far-fetched remedies. It wasn’t a way of giving up, it was a calculation weighing the quality of an actualized life over unproven remedies, and I found that took more strength than anything over the endless searching. Strength beyond most people.

  By December, my days took on a set pattern. A hospice volunteer would arrive at eight o’clock, I wo
uld go to work, and then Sophia’s mom would come at about two o’clock in the afternoon and stay until I got home sometime before six. There was very little other external support I could rely on as I greeted Sophia’s sobbing mom every weekday when I arrived home.

  My mom would come over and visit when she was in town. My parents spent a few months a year at a small ranch in New Mexico. Evelyn was particularly helpful when she was in town—a natural caretaker as she had always been. A mother never fails to be a mother, no matter the age of her children. I had made my peace with my father after the abrupt call from the hospital the night of Sophia’s surgery. Given the tragic situation at hand, they both commended me on wanting to take care of her.

  I could talk with my parents in such a different way than I could with Sophia’s family members. When I would see Sophia’s mom, Barbara, crying in the evening when I arrived home, it was painful to witness. Neither of us could carry on much of a conversation. Barbara was very good at keeping food in the place and she cleaned the apartment repeatedly, a therapeutic task that served as a useful diversion from succumbing to sadness. I sympathized with Barbara’s cleaning. I figured the compulsive ironing I used to engage in was just a way to quiet my overactive mind during times when just getting through the day itself had become a crushing burden. The way my pressed clothes looked didn’t matter to me anymore as I became engrossed in Sophia’s condition.

  Outside of the apartment, no one wanted to hear the real story, the day-to-day struggle. People just needed a few quick facts and left the rest to their imaginations as to how, why, and the way in which I would handle the situation. Friends and acquaintances would walk away in mid-sentence with a pained look whenever I started to relate the gory details of the operation and the things that ran amok in Sophia’s body.

  I learned from this exercise that people, in general, didn’t want to hear the deep story. Not because it disgusted them, but because they worried about being faced with the same scenario and not being able to handle it themselves.

  The weekends became very long as no one from her family offered to stay with Sophia. By the time December arrived, she was scared for me to go anywhere except work. I wanted to be with her, but it was hard to sit the whole weekend without being able to leave. My apartment, once my agoraphobic safe zone, had now been replaced by the terminal condition of one of its occupants—and at times, under the heavy hand of guilt, I even wanted out.

  As Christmas neared, I would ask Sophia repeatedly what gifts she wanted. I managed one day to bring home a perfectly shaped Christmas tree that brushed the top of our nine-foot ceiling. With great care, I filled the tree with ornaments and lights. I wanted it to be the nicest Christmas tree she ever had. Sophia loved the tree but didn’t want any gifts, she just wanted to be with me. She would give lengthy explanations of her reasoning, yet my natural insecurities wouldn’t let me fully accept that anyone would regard me as a gift, despite her declarations.

  The thing I wanted most to bestow upon her was an achievement nobody could give. I wanted to give Sophia back her health. If I could reach into otherworldly powers to somehow deceive physics and reverse time, even if it meant dying for her, I would have done it. As I sat for hours with Sophia, I saw what little resemblance of her remained. Her condition deteriorated as cancer riddled her body with implausible speed. Sophia’s emaciated face underscored her skeletal features and her skin had a yellowish tone; the cancer had spread to her liver.

  Morphine became the cocktail of the day at the latter stages. Though Sophia had a strong anti-drug stance, she didn’t resist the prescribed dosage when a hospice nurse brought over the first bottle. She would spend most of her time on our bed slipping in and out of consciousness, affected by the sixty-milligram Morphine doses. Her usual position was with her back propped against the bedroom wall, head tilted up, mouth agape, and lower jaw pushed back. Although sleep dominated her waning days, when she was awake, her eyes would shove upward in her head, leaving only the whites of her eyes exposed much of the time.

  Many nights I would enter the bedroom and freeze in the doorway to see if she was still breathing. As I watched, my first pleading wish always was, please don’t die now. I’m not quite sure I can handle it. The systematic response of what to do when she died went through my head. First: give her a kiss. Second: call the hospice nurse to arrange for the mortuary to retrieve her body. Third: call relatives and friends. I watched Sophia intently while mentally going through the list when her arm would jerk, an executed breath completed, and my feeling of dread subsided.

  I wrote the three tasks down for consultation when the time arrived. The list became another piece of folded paper in my wallet amongst other lists, notes and currency that now meant nothing to me.

  She would venture out of bed once in a while and walk around the apartment in a hunched-over fashion. Her eyes would roll into her head and almost close as she would forget why she got up in the first place. Her memory would lapse reading the clock, she would pause in confusion for a moment before determining if it was day or night.

  I noticed how her chest muscle had deteriorated. Her breasts, once firm and round, were small and sagging, her ribs thoroughly exposed, as if she were a victim of a concentration camp. Her beautiful long, thick black hair fell limply over her bony shoulders and back. It had thinned considerably. The lower half of her body retained fluid and bile, causing severe bloating. The added girth contrasted her starving upper body. Sophia’s once svelte physique now resembled an elongated pear. The organs in her body were sweating water and other waste but had no place to digest since her liver was barely functioning. The result was liquid settling into her lower extremities. The fluids filled up from her toes all the way to her stomach. Both her legs and feet were puffed to capacity. Squared off due to the excess swelling, her feet were almost club-like. Sophia at times expressed concern that her skin was going to split open and explode due to the excessive swelling.

  I would watch her sway slowly about the apartment. The heartache left a thumping emptiness in my chest as I glanced at pictures of Sophia I mounted on the wall two months earlier, trying to remember the way she was as a healthy person. Her voice once strong, now slurred, her wit and intuition now a distant memory, her outer beauty now marred. It helped my sanity to look at those pictures and grasp what we had in our brief, interrupted relationship. Just shy of four months after the fateful surgery, it had come to this.

  26. The Eve

  When I arrived home from a shortened Christmas Eve workday, Sophia had moved from the bed to the leather sofa in the living room. Barbara was preparing homemade tamales for me as I greeted Sophia with a kiss on her forehead. Alexa was there also. I was surprised to see Alexa, she hadn’t come over much in the past couple of months. Her absence wasn’t from a lack of caring, she just couldn’t seem to handle seeing her sister in such a degenerated state.

  After eating five of Barbara’s tamales, I prepared for a nap in the bedroom. My schedule since Thanksgiving included an hour nap when I got home to help me stay alert until one or two in the morning in case Sophia needed some assistance.

  Barbara and Alexa kissed Sophia while she slept and left the apartment to allow me some quiet napping time. I drifted off within five minutes of flopping on the bed—stomach full of tamales.

  I awoke from my hard sleep at seven in the evening, a three-hour escape, much longer than usual. As many families around the country were beginning to celebrate Christmas Eve, I felt alone, but remained thankful Sophia and I were together.

  As I prepared to jump up out of bed, I noticed the apartment was completely dark except for the bluish ambient light emanating from the television in the living room. I took a few staggering steps to the light switch to check on Sophia.

  She was somewhat awake, her eyes blinked when the ceiling light went on. I sat on the couch, nudged next to her body and gave her a kiss. The ends of her lips performed a slight upward curl.

/>   There was a chemical smell around her and the back of my shorts got colder as the sensation of seeping liquid slowly flowed up the back of my upper legs. I lifted the white knit blanket wrapped around her body and noticed she was lying in a puddle of yellowish brown urine. As I pulled up her long undershirt, Sophia lifted her heavy hands and put them over her bare crotch, knowing that she had peed but couldn’t get to the bathroom by herself.

  “Baby, it’s okay. Let me get you cleaned up. It’s okay, don’t worry. I still love you even though you went on the couch.”

  Sophia tried to smile but remained still as I lifted her hands above her head and removed her long t-shirt.

  I went into the kitchen to get a roll of paper towels, and then to the small hall closet for some bath linen. I also brought a Morphine pill as an ephemeral attempt to relax her while I cleaned. It was a couple of hours shy of her next dosage, but I didn’t want her to get too emotional or add any additional feelings of embarrassment.

  “Here, take this.” I slipped the small pill between her teeth and grabbed a glass of water sitting on the coffee table. I poured enough water to fill half her mouth. The bitter taste of the tiny pill made her eyelids clamp together as she swallowed.

  “I’ll get you all cleaned up,” I said, as I dabbed her legs and the leather cushions with a clump of paper towels to soak up the liquid.