It took a few hours in the hospital basement to do a PET scan and bone marrow biopsy, then I went home to wait for the results.
I was standing in the bathroom of the new house when the doctor who would be my oncologist called. His name, coincidentally, was Dr. Newman, and he was young. I could tell from his voice he did not have good news.
“It’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” he said, then paused.
“Okay,” was my response. I had already suspected that would be the diagnosis.
Then he said, “It’s stage IV. This means it’s spread widely through your body. You have tumors in every organ and in your bone marrow.”
I had a four-month old baby, a three-year-old with Treacher Collins, and stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A tumor had fractured my spine, which explained why walking was so painful. Another tumor, as big as two fists, was pushing on my heart, which was why I had thought I was having a heart attack.
I wanted a second opinion, but the oncologist told me, “You don’t have time for second opinions. This is stage IV. Thirty percent of your bone marrow is cancerous. Every hour counts; we have to begin treatment tomorrow.”
I stood there holding the phone, tears coming down my cheeks, and started to hyperventilate. “Am I going to die?”
The doctor was quiet for a moment, then said, “It’s a possibility. If we leave it untreated, you will die.”
I pressed him for more information. “How much longer will I live without chemo?”
He said, “Two months, maximum. You’re going to have a very rough course of chemo. It will either kill you or cure you.”
That afternoon and the next morning, I stayed in my bedroom. Russel’s parents came over to help out with Nathaniel and Jacob, but nobody ventured into my room to reassure me. Nobody told me I might be okay. Who knew what to do or say? I was a dying woman.
I didn’t see the boys. I didn’t eat anything. I just screamed and cried. Why, why, why was I even born? Who would take care of my kids? Who would sacrifice their life to take care of Nathaniel? I was already drugged up on painkillers and Xanax for my anxiety, and now I was scared that I was dying and angry that nobody had believed me. I was so desperate and broken in my body and soul that I couldn’t stop screaming. It actually kind of helped me feel better.
My parents were devastated to hear the news. In Poland, when you hear the word cancer it’s the end of the world. When my grandfather had cancer, I had no idea. He was sick, but nobody talked about his diagnosis. Then I found a bottle of pills or syrup stowed away on top of the refrigerator. I’d seen a commercial on TV for this particular medication, advertising it as “a miracle cure for cancer.”
“Does Grandpa have cancer?” I asked my mother.
“No, no,” she said. “We’re just trying all the options.”
My mother was so strong when I called her in a panic after having given birth to Nathaniel, but she was hopeless when I had lymphoma. I truly think that they didn’t believe my diagnosis. I was too young for this. Deep down, in their hearts, they thought it had to be a different disease. That’s what got them through. Maybe they’d thought the same thing about my grandfather.
When Nathaniel was born, I couldn’t understand why God had done this to him or had given him to me. Later I felt like I was chosen, like God picked me to raise this child. I was resolved to make something good from him being born with Treacher Collins. Now I questioned God again, this time with more anger and doubt. I asked, Where are you? Are you kidding me? I gave up my life for this kid. I do everything for him. Now you’re going to take my life away? Why are you punishing me again?
How could I get cancer? Russel grew up in a place where everyone ate processed foods. They lived under power lines. They parked in underground garages, microwaved plastic, and used talcum powder. They sprayed pesticides in their homes and cleaned them away with chemicals. They were subject to every known or suspected cancer risk in the modern world.
When you have cancer, or a child with a genetic mutation for that matter, you can’t help asking yourself if it’s your fault, somehow connected to something you did. But I couldn’t find any way to blame my upbringing. I grew up on an organic farm in Eastern Europe with no packaged foods, no hormones, no chemicals. When I came to the United States I’d never even taken an antibiotic. When I was a kid, I knew restaurants existed, but my mom always warned, “You never know what’s in that food. You are what you put in your body.”
We ate the vegetables and fruit that we grew on the farm. Like all children of farmers, my siblings and I had daily chores. We each had parts of the garden we were responsible for weeding. No fourteen-year-old kid wants to weed a cabbage patch, but we had no choice—if we wanted to eat, we had to help raise the food. We also went fishing and ate what we caught. The greatest fun of all was mushroom picking.
Mushroom season lasts for only a couple months at the end of summer. My father would wake three of us—the oldest of the six kids who would eventually form our family—at three in the morning. (My mother never came with us. Someone had to stay home to sell tomatoes and make sure people didn’t jump the fence to steal food from the farm. Once she stopped a thief who tried to steal all our shoes—she beat him with a broom and called the police.)
With little backpacks that my mom packed full of lunch and snacks and carrying cute woven baskets, we drove to the woods. By the time we got there, it was dawn. We watched the sun rise and headed straight into the wilderness. There were no trails, but my father had a great sense of direction. No matter how far we wandered, he could always find his way out. He knew where and how to find mushrooms, even when we hadn’t been there for a while. He showed us which mushrooms were poisonous and which were considered to be the top of the mushroom royal family. Cheap mushrooms grew on top of tree stumps, but the higher quality ones knew better—they hid in the moss. Mushrooms that were spongy under the cap were tastier than those with slits. The very best was the prawdziwek, which means “the real mushroom.”
We would race through the woods, competing for the best haul. It was always an adventure. The first time Michal joined us, he stood up from searching around a shady stump and said, “What’s that? Something’s hitting my foot!” It was a snake, striking his boot again and again. He was so little he had no idea what it was.
We’d get home a few hours later, clean the mushrooms, cut them up, and spread them out to air-dry. Some went into jars of sauce that we would use for dinner. Others were reserved for soup. My mother kept some dried mushrooms in a special cotton sack for use throughout the year, and the rest were pickled.
The work we put into collecting mushrooms gave the food we ate deeper meaning. I love cooking with mushrooms, but the farmed ones sold at the grocery store don’t compare to the ones I grew up eating. My family ships me dried mushrooms in Ziploc bags, and whenever someone visits from Poland, they sneak some through customs. Using them in my recipes makes my house smell as good as when my mother cooked them, bringing back happy memories of the woods, my childhood, my family.
Growing up on an organic farm also meant that my father never, ever used chemicals on his crops. His vigilance in this was absolute, and it led to what was, at the time, one of the most horrifying evenings of my life.
One year we had a plague of huge black slugs. They were six inches long, looked like small snakes, and left trails of slime on the tomato plants, ruining them. Of course my father wouldn’t use pesticide, so he began sitting guard in the greenhouse, watching the slugs until he understood their behavior patterns. After a few days of this, he told us that, based on his observations, the slugs would come out when the sun went down, party on the tomatoes for a while, then go back into the ground. There was only one way to get rid of them: Pick them off by hand. That was where we kids came into the picture.
Our slug removal efforts began late at night, around 10:00 P.M. My father gave each of us a plastic bag and a flashlight, and assigned us each rows of tomato plants that were so thickly covered in slugs, all
you could see was black. Cringing, I made my way down my rows, picking off all the nasty slugs by hand and depositing them in the plastic bag. I must have collected at least a hundred. At school, my classmates already teased me for being a farm girl; they called me “carrot.” I was furious and embarrassed by this new indignity. Nobody else had to do things like this.
When we had purged our designated rows of slugs, we delivered our bags to my father and he threw them onto a campfire. They made a hissing sound as they burnt and we all screamed. This collection and slaughter went on for a few nights until there were no slugs left to be found. That’s how crazy my dad was about not putting chemicals on crops.
As we get older, we realize that the best memories aren’t just the happiest ones but the ones that stick. Now, twenty-five years later, those black slugs are still sliming their way around my head. No doubt they will be there forever, and I treasure the permanence of that moment, singular enough to stand out among the gathered days of my childhood. Not a bad realization for the mother of a kid whose early days were full of surgeries. I hoped that the hospital visits would blend together into a routine, forgettable blur, but also that if bad moments stood out, one day the pain (or sliminess) of them would recede, leaving only a proud war story.
Russel finds it ironic and infuriating that my wholesome childhood didn’t guarantee me a cancer-free life. No doctor can say what caused my cancer—like many cancers it begins when a cell mutates—but in my heart of hearts I had a completely unscientific explanation for how it had happened. I remain convinced that the cancer was triggered six months earlier, when Nathaniel’s surgery went wrong. The moment the doctor came out of the OR and told us he had accidently poked Nathaniel’s brain didn’t fall into the “oopsy daisy, we all make mistakes” category. It was easy to see the shock and stress of that moment compromising my immune system and opening the door to cancer.
The chemo was like a miracle. After the very first treatment, my pain was gone. I came home and said, “If this is what chemo does, I want more!” Even Dr. Newman was surprised that the improvement was so quick. When I showed up for my second treatment, I was already standing up straight again.
I was supposed to have chemo every other week for six months, for a total of twelve rounds, but halfway through the medications started to hit me and one of my lungs collapsed. They had to slow down the frequency of my treatments, so the whole process ended up taking eight months.
One night, after the chemo had started taking its toll, Russel saw Nathaniel walk into our room, where I was sleeping. He had just become a big brother, and his mother hadn’t been the same since. As Russel watched, he stuck out his little hand and appeared to sprinkle something on my head.
“What are you doing to Mommy?” Russel asked.
“I’m sprinkling magic dust on her so she gets better,” Nathaniel said.
Russel cried when Nathaniel said this, and he cried when he told it to me, and he cries every time he tells that story. He says, “However flawed I was, I was raising a little boy who, for all his own challenges, was determined to help and heal his mother.”
13. Casseroles and Pity
I was physically ill, and I lamented the loss of the life I’d expected to have and the support I’d planned to give my sons. Sometimes, alone in the bathroom, I would scream. Russel always knew when to keep the kids away so they didn’t see their mother at her weakest.
Meanwhile, our neighbors were appearing on our doorstep, bringing casseroles and pity. They said, “Bless you hard,” encouraging me to read the Bible and prepare to hug Jesus. My neighbor Karen, a truly kind woman, had her whole church praying for me. It felt like they were praying for my soul since they already considered me a lost cause.
I thanked them politely but what I wanted to say was, Would you be excited to meet Jesus if you were in my shoes? It reminded me of how people had behaved in the hospital when Nathaniel was born. Nobody said congratulations because they were already grieving.
One time I invited Donna, a friend I’d made in the chemo room, over for lunch with her husband. Russel took him out back to show him the houses that were under construction in our development. They were nearly finished, but unfurnished and never locked. Sometimes, we’d walk over with the kids and make up stories about the dragons that lived there, but adults liked to snoop around too, checking out floorplans and guessing what they would sell for.
When the men disappeared, Donna confided, “Magda, I can’t say this in front of my husband. Everyone tells me I’m blessed, that Jesus is waiting for me, but I’m not ready; I don’t want to die. I’m mad at God. I have young kids and I want to see them grow up. I don’t feel religious anymore. I’m so scared.”
When I went to chemo three days later, her chair was empty. She’d only been in her forties, and she had lost her battle.
Like Donna, I wasn’t so devout that I could come to terms with death. I wanted to live.
Support came from the most unexpected places—angels we never looked for appeared as if sent. A cousin of mine who lived in Chicago put me in touch with Kalina, a Polish friend of his. It literally was like: “Oh, you have cancer? My friend had cancer. You guys have so much in common!”
In the beginning, when I was digesting the fact that I was sick, Kalina called me every night. She’d had cancer twice and had been in remission for ten years. She knew how to give me strength, and her confidence that I would survive made me start thinking that maybe I would actually make it. Over the phone, this woman I had never met told me, “You have nothing to worry about. I am psychic. I know you’re going to be fine, just like I am.”
Kalina believed in tough love and was not one to mince words. If I said I was afraid I wouldn’t survive, she’d say something like, “You’re going to give up and let some bitch raise your kids? I thought you were better than that! Don’t sit around pitying yourself. This is just a bump in the road.” Someone else might have found her too harsh, but she made me laugh. It was exactly what I needed.
Russel had no idea how to comfort me. All he did was cry. When I cried, he cried. But he instantly recognized what Kalina did for me. The minute she’d call Russel would spring to action: “Okay, everybody, come with me. Mom’s talking to Kalina.” He’d gather the kids and vanish.
Kalina was my guru. She had survived, so I did whatever she told me to do. If she said beet juice was good for my blood, I drank beet juice. If she told me to be selfish and sleep when I was tired, I obeyed. My attitude started to shift from victim to survivor.
People had warned me that losing my hair would be traumatic. Following their advice, I went to a wig-maker in Charlotte. She studied my face and coloring and made me an expensive wig from real hair. It was a brown bob and I looked like an old lady in it, which, come to think of it, was not a bad match for how I felt. I had the wig on hand, but when I went to a salon to get my head shaved, they told me not to do it all at once because it would be easier to accept if I started with a bob and then got a pixie cut, and waited to shave it until it fell out. Oh, and did it fall out! I was taking a shower after my third round of chemo and when I looked down, I saw that the whole floor of the stall was covered with hair. I reached up to my head and—hair fell into my hands. It was clogging the drain. I went into the shower with hair and came out nearly bald. It would have been much less traumatic to shave it sooner. The next day I went to a salon and asked the stylist to take the rest off.
Kalina’s “think positive” attitude was in the air. One Friday night a week or so after I lost my hair, two of Russel’s frat brothers showed up with a plan. As we joked around over pizza, the guys declared their intention to shave their heads in solidarity with me. They took a chair and a bowl of water out onto the patio and then, with beers in their hands and music playing, Russel and his friends took turns shaving one another’s heads. Afterward, we took pictures of us all standing together, a bald quartet. When they left the next day, one of them handed me The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, which was on the bestsell
er list at the time, and said, “I feel like you should read this book.”
People often turn to religion and self-help books when dealing with illness or medical challenges. The dominant message of the Christian books that I’d been given was that we should accept Nathaniel as he was born, or that I should joyfully accept the fact that I was dying and that I was lucky because I would soon be in heaven with Jesus.
I swallowed The Secret whole. The book preached a shift in thinking, and it inspired me to take control of my destiny. I saw that I had two choices: to stay angry, live in a dark world, and have my kids see and grow up with that, or to find a way to focus on positive things. Talking to Kalina and reading The Secret set me on a new path. I chose to embrace life, to fight for myself and for the best life I could give Nathaniel.
I worked hard at not being upset. Instead of spiraling about cancer, I envisioned the outcome I wanted. I made a point of telling myself that I would be okay, that I had the kids to live for. From then on, whenever I heard someone had cancer, the first thing I did was give them that book. It may be a voodoo philosophy, but the underlying message for me was that God exists. Because what is thinking positive if it not having faith? And who is the person who tells you to believe this if not a messenger from God?
There were angels in our life who showed their hearts when we had moments of despair. When Nathaniel was born, Russel’s bosses let him work from home. One day they handed him a $6,000 check. The company had passed a hat to help us pay for frozen ready-made meals and a cleaning service. We didn’t have to search for these angels. They were already among us.
Some people try to stand out. Maybe they draw attention to themselves by looking different—by getting tattoos or wearing bright clothes or dyeing their hair purple. But Nathaniel was noticed from the moment he was born and from then on, without asking for attention or saying a word. He wasn’t given the choice. I, as his mother, received similar attention, which always fell under the category of “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with your child?” When I was a competitive pianist, I liked the attention I received being on stage; it energized me. But this was different.
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