* * *
—
MY STOMACH CRAMPS were worse now. I’d been in pain for nearly a week, and it was getting to the point where I could barely hold it together. I was hunched over at my desk at work one afternoon, my left hand holding my abdomen, my right hand on the mouse. I couldn’t concentrate. My forehead was sweaty and I could hardly keep my eyes open. The computer screen went blurry. As if in slow motion, I tipped over, fell to the floor, and just lay there.
“You okay?” Brian asked.
“I think I need to go to the hospital.”
As Teddy was being discharged upstairs, I was being admitted downstairs.
Molly met me in Emergency. I would never have asked her to come, but I was touched that she did. She lay down next to me in the hospital bed while a nurse hooked me up to a morphine drip. The pain was so intense I could barely talk.
Molly pulled out her iPad and cued up an episode of our favourite not-so-guilty pleasure, The Fosters—a cheesy yet addictive lesbian family drama. It wasn’t a typical date night, but what was typical these days?
The doctor entered my curtained-off room, clipboard in hand, and peppered me with questions that all seemed to focus on whether I might be pregnant. “Are you sexually active?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling at Molly. “But I assure you, our birth control method is foolproof.” The doctor looked up from her clipboard and laughed. Then she apologized in advance for making me pee in a cup, saying it was a matter of protocol that I take a pregnancy test. They also had me do a blood test and an ultrasound.
Finally, after all the poking and prodding, appendicitis, ulcers, and pregnancy (phew!) were all ruled out. They gave me a prescription for inflammation. The cause of the pain remained a mystery, although the doctor did say that nearly half of stomach-pain cases go unsolved. I know it seems obvious now, but at the time it didn’t occur to me that it might be from, I dunno, stress? That I was having my own mind-body breakdown? I just filed it away as a medical cold case.
“Can I have one more hit of morphine for the road?” I asked. They moved me to a row of vinyl reclining chairs in the hallway for my last morphine drip. Molly went for a walk while I kicked back and tried to relax.
“What do you do for a living?” asked the older man in the chair next to me.
“I work in radio,” I said, being deliberately vague. I was no longer voluntarily telling people I worked on Q.
“I love the radio! What station?” Talk about a buzzkill.
“CBC,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the ceiling. I hoped he’d get the hint.
“Ah, the CBC! Do you know that guy who punches women?”
There wasn’t enough morphine in the world.
By the time we left the ER, the pain had finally subsided. Even better, I felt happy for the first time in ages. I hadn’t realized how depressed I’d been, how much weight I’d been carrying around, until the heaviness lifted. I felt strangely like myself again, funny and light and energetic. Molly and I held hands and laughed as we threw open the hospital doors and skipped all the way home. For one night only, I didn’t have a care in the world. Thanks, opiates!
Mom really must have felt sorry for me, because that evening she sent me a text: “OK I’m going to go to the surgeon with you because I love you so much and know you have my best interests at heart. I’m sorry you’re so scared. I hope you sleep well and feel better tomorrow. As my mother used to say, roses in your pillow.”
Mom and I made a deal. We’d go see Dr. Stotland together as a family, and then, for one hour, she’d listen to what we all had to say. I promised that if she complied, I would never hassle her again. Mom agreed but said she couldn’t do it till late February. There was somewhere else she needed to go first.
* * *
—
IN MID-FEBRUARY MOM flew to Costa Rica for a week-long juice fast in the jungle. She was hoping to cure herself of parasites and candida (and hey, maybe cancer while she was at it). She still wasn’t convinced that it was her cancer making her feel unwell.
For seven days Mom drank only fresh-pressed juices, superfood shakes, and vegetable broth. She had a great time doing shots of maca and moringa around the pool with her new fast friends. The others were there mainly hoping to shed a few pounds, but it was Mom who took the title of Biggest Loser. Before her flight home she emailed Teddy, Josh, and me, asking to be picked up from the airport: “I’m going to use a wheelchair because I do get tired standing for a long time, but don’t be scared. I’m mobile, if skinny, and definitely feel better.”
It was shocking how thin she looked. “I know, it’s horrifying. I look like a concentration camp victim,” Mom admitted. She insisted that her frailty was a result of the juice fasting and that she’d gain the weight back soon, but I could tell she was frightened. “My life is a clusterfuck these days,” she said. She was rereading Radical Remission, her favourite book on spontaneous healing, to calm herself down.
I wrote to Dr. Stotland in advance of our visit to let him know what had happened since we’d seen him last, when Mom’s cancer was Stage 2. I told him that I felt she was killing herself, and that there might be a way for him to validate her alternative ideas while still advocating for medical intervention: Mom not only needed to believe in treatment but also to feel it was her choice.
When the day finally rolled around, the four of us gathered in Dr. Stotland’s office. He got straight to the point. “There’s no question your tumour has progressed,” he said. “You’ve gone from local to advanced cancer. It’s gone deeper into the wall. Hopefully, not beyond.”
“Is there anything Western medicine can offer me besides that operation?” Mom asked.
“We don’t even know if we can offer that anymore,” he said. “You might not be a candidate for surgery. We have to see if there’s cancer elsewhere in your body.” Dr. Stotland urged Mom to get a CT scan so that he could see whether her cancer had spread to her lungs or liver. If it was only Stage 3, Mom would still have a sixty percent survival rate if she did surgery, chemo, and radiation. “We hope you don’t have Stage 4,” he said. “That’s much more complicated.”
“It hasn’t gone into the liver. I know it,” said Mom.
I turned to her. “How do you know that?”
“I have no symptoms,” she said.
“What are you talking about? Look how skinny you are!”
“That’s because of my parasites and going on the cleanse.”
“Most people don’t have symptoms until they are where you are now,” Dr. Stotland said. “People who don’t get colonoscopies only find out they have cancer when it’s advanced. Most people I see are starting off where you are now.”
I looked at Dr. Stotland. “What is a death like from rectal cancer?” I knew it would be hard for Mom to hear it, but this was my version of tough love.
“I’ve heard it,” Mom protested. “I don’t need—”
“It’s not fun. It’s horrible,” he answered before she could protest any further. “If it goes into the bones or nerves, it’s misery.” I was pleased he was taking my cues and was silently cheering him on. “If this thing doesn’t spread, it will grow and block you off until you get an infection that will kill you. At that point, we would hope that your bowel would perforate because that would kill you quicker.”
“Woo, not fun.” Mom let out a deep exhalation. Dr. Stotland excused himself for a few minutes.
“It would be a big trauma to have surgery,” Mom said. “What if I can live for another ten years without doing it?”
“That’s not the direction you’re going in,” I said.
“But I went off course. Cancer comes back if you go off course.”
“It didn’t come back. It never went away!”
“I know it didn’t go away, but I was going to live with it forever. A lot of people live with their polyps forever.
”
“That’s not the reality. Cancer grows.”
“Not necessarily, not if you do the right things it doesn’t.”
Josh interjected. “You’ve fallen back into a circular conversation.”
“Rachel, your mother is entitled to do whatever she wants,” Teddy said. We were all talking over one another.
“You know what this reminds me of?” Mom said, sitting back and smiling. “When we all went to see that psychiatrist we took Josh to because he was nuts and acting out.”
“I think I was just responding to my parents’ behaviour,” Josh said, laughing.
“Which shrink was this?” Teddy asked. We were all talking over one another again.
“Hey, stop it!” Mom said. “It’s my job to be the interrupter in the family.” She went on: “At the end of the session the shrink declared, ‘Josh is the sanest person in this family.’ ” Mom looked over at me. “And then you said in your high squeaky voice, ‘No, I’m the sanest!’ And then on the car ride home, Teddy, you said, ‘I really think I’m the sanest.’ And then I quietly thought to myself, ‘It’s actually me.’ ”
Dr. Stotland came back into the room. “You’ve got to figure out what you want to do,” he said.
“I want to think it over. I’m very scared,” Mom said.
“What are you scared of?” he asked.
“I’m afraid of the treatment. It’s true,” Mom admitted.
“I don’t like doctors myself,” Dr. Stotland said. “I’m a basket case when I have to go. We all have our things. But if you take a step back and see what medicine can do, there are benefits. It’s the fight of your life. It’s no joke. But it’s effective. And it’s the best we have.”
I was giving him a standing ovation in my head.
“The next step is getting a CT scan,” he said, getting up to hold the door open for us.
As we all got up to leave, Mom turned to him. “If I’m lucky and I cure myself, would you be interested or offended if I came back to tell you about it?”
Teddy, Josh, and I exchanged a glance.
“I’d be more than interested,” Dr. Stotland said, smiling kindly.
“Of course he’d be interested,” I joked. “It would be like the Immaculate Conception of oncology!”
As I walked past him he whispered, “I’ll be in touch.”
We shuffled down the hallway and confirmed our plan to meet up on Sunday at Teddy’s to discuss the matter. As painful as it was to see Mom so terrified, a part of me was glad to see her in touch with her fear.
That evening, Dr. Stotland called me from his car on his way home from the hospital. “Has your mother always been like this?” he asked. I didn’t even know where to begin. “My secretary is also into alternative stuff,” he continued, “but when she got breast cancer she decided to take advantage of both worlds.”
“I think that would be my approach, too.”
“Has she ever seen a psychiatrist?”
I told him how Mom had decided that she didn’t need talk therapy because her healers, and all the work she was doing on her own, were enough help. And that Pam, her reflexologist, was now her hyphen-therapist.
“My whole life is cancer. This is all I do,” he said. I could hear it in his voice: Dr. Stotland was getting worked up. He sounded agitated. “There’s a good chance she’ll do nothing. And then it might be hard on you.”
I was struck by how this normally self-controlled doctor was displaying so much emotion and distress. It was both heartening and tremendously disconcerting. Although it was comforting to hear him validate my position, I knew what his grave concern implied: Mom was in serious trouble.
“It’s not easy watching someone go through something if you think there could’ve been a better solution,” he said with resignation in his voice. “If it were my family, it would be killing me.”
I choked back my tears. It was.
12
INTERVENTION WITH A SIDE OF LOX
“Are you sure you’re up for your trip to Brazil?” I asked Mom. She admitted that she was feeling very weak in the days after our family visit to Dr. Stotland.
“Oh, I’ve decided not to go,” she said casually, as if it were old news.
“Really?” I squealed. “Why not?”
“I felt that I didn’t believe in it enough. It only works if you believe in it. I looked into it. John of God…he doesn’t charge for his ten seconds, which has helped lots of people, but you pay a lot for the herbs and the crystal baths and the—”
“It’s okay, Mom. You don’t have to explain,” I said, breathing a rare sigh of relief. “Just let me have this moment.”
I was encouraged by Mom’s new—and even somewhat rational—perspective on things. Maybe she was about to finally come around? Our intervention brunch at Teddy’s could not have been better timed. On the menu: bagels, lox, stop Mom from killing herself.
As we sat around the dining room table and began assembling our bagels, I laid out the ground rules. “Mom promised that she’ll listen to us. We are allowed to be critical for this one hour.”
“Can we be critical about other things too?” Josh joked.
“No, there’s not enough time,” Mom replied, laughing. “Focus your critiques. I decided I wanted to listen without always preparing rebuttals.”
“That way we can be free to be honest without you getting mad,” I clarified.
“How’s the egg salad?” Teddy asked Mom.
“You take charge, Rachel,” she said.
I turned to Mom and, like the lawyer I never became, began my opening arguments.
“I hope you can get in touch with the part of yourself that doubts what you’ve been doing. The same part of you that questioned whether John of God was the way to go. The same part of you that’s scared when the doctors are talking. I hope you can listen to that part of you.” Mom listened attentively while picking at her scoop of egg salad.
“Four years ago, you were given a ninety percent chance of being cured. You gambled that away with the hope that you could heal yourself naturally. And no signs have pointed to any success with whatever you’ve been doing. All signs have shown that your cancer is growing, just as the doctors thought it would, just as science said it would. Now you’re at advanced Stage 3 cancer. Please, cut your losses. This is your last chance to live. If you gamble this away, you have nothing else.”
“Can I have the cream cheese please?” Teddy asked.
I kept going. “The most important thing is that you remove the cancerous lump from your body.”
“Can I have some more lox please?” asked Josh.
“Your herbs might be helping, but they aren’t going to do the trick. I don’t understand how, if you’re really, really honest with yourself, you can believe that you can get rid of your cancer by doing herbs and juice, or anything other than surgically removing it from your body.”
“I’m listening,” Mom said.
Teddy was up next. He turned to face her. “It may be that logic isn’t the process that will appeal to you in these circumstances. But all my intelligence, logic, knowledge of life, and hearing what doctors have said have persuaded me right from the start that there’s no other sensible way of addressing your illness without undergoing surgery. I thought that four years ago, and I think it even more today. And I think you’re fortunate that, despite not having done it four years ago, there’s still a chance it can be done. My view is that if it’s available, you should grab the opportunity. I would grab it, I would go running for it, I would do it as quickly as possible. Because you may have many more years of life that way. I don’t think any of the alternatives you’ve been pursuing will hold out any reasonable hope of any improvement to your condition. I think they’re all a waste of time. Just stop doing that! Quit looking for a miracle cure that’s going to come to your rescue. H
ave the surgery and get on with your life.”
I spoke again. “You don’t have any more time to try it your way. You tried it your way and it has not worked. It just has not worked. The tumour has grown. I don’t understand how you don’t think you will die in a year or two.”
Teddy jumped in again. “Are you willing to bet your life that Dr. Stotland is wrong? As a matter of reason, you would have to conclude that he’s wrong and the other four or five doctors are all wrong, and that despite their views you’re going to lick it. If you think they’re all wrong, and you’re right, you have to re-examine your thought process.”
“There are other ways of looking at it,” Mom said defiantly.
Teddy looked over at Josh. “Anything you want to add?”
“I was thinking about if I did. I don’t know if I do,” Josh said.
“You don’t want her to do one thing or another?” I challenged.
“I don’t know if that’s important. It’s her life. I’ve adjusted to the fact that Mom has a deeply held belief system regarding this, and at the end of the day, whether she lives a year or two, or a few years, I want her to feel completely loved and supported, and that every moment is a positive experience.”
“That’s not what I’m asking you,” I said, annoyed by his Kumbaya mentality. “First of all, we’re talking about the difference between her dying in a year or two and her living for another fifteen to twenty years. And I’m not asking if you want to fight with her. I’m asking you—while we have the opportunity now to be honest—what do you want her to do?”
“In fairness, she’s heard far more than I have about what she’s facing, what her options are, what her choices are,” Josh said.
I pushed him further. “What would you do if you were her?”
“I’m not. I don’t know. If I were exactly her, I would do exactly what she’s doing.”
“So you’re just choosing to stay out of it?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“What if she asked you for advice?”
Dead Mom Walking Page 15