It was the 6-month checkup. It felt normal, and routine. Like going to the dentist. I drove my mother to the doctor’s appointment in Jacksonville. It was raining, and she worried about the “squaw line” coming across the state as if it was a band of radioactive storms sent to wipe out mankind.
“Do you know how to drive in a squaw line?” she said.
It was funny, worrying about something else for a change.
Could it have been 6 months already? Six months since this very same doctor told her that even though it looked like all the cancer cells had been removed during surgery, chemotherapy was needed to mop up possible stragglers.
I can’t remember the last time I had the wind knocked out of me. But this did the trick.
Six months on the wildest, bumpiest ride I’ve ever experienced. Country-road-with-bad-shocks bumpy. She started chemo in September. She fell in the driveway the next day and broke her hip. She fell again a week or so later and fractured a knee. Six months of metal rods and rehab. Social workers and anti-nausea medicines. ER visits, wheelchairs, bone marrow shots, white blood cell counts, handicap rails …
It’s easy to lose perspective while you’re in the midst of it. You need a moment of reflection, when you’re free from it all, to put it in context. When you can look back and say, “Whooeeee!” only to realize “Whooeeee!” doesn’t do it justice. You need a word that a newspaper won’t publish … and explosions in the background.
I thought about how far we’ve come. How much this woman has had to OVERcome. How we’ve seen doctors so many times, we know their family stories. (When you ask a doctor about how his battle with grass root-rot fungus is going, you’ve seen him too much.)
Then there was how I had changed. Half a year ago, I had no idea what I was facing. How I would manage. How I would become a caregiver and a support group and even a businessman managing commercial real estate that my mother has always overseen. I feel like a different person now — more seasoned, more knowledgeable, more grizzled.
We went up to Jacksonville last week and traded stories with the doctor. Then he said, “OK, take care. I’ll see you in 6 months,” and he got up and left. Just like that. No champagne bottles popped. No balloons fell from the ceiling. No nurses ran in screaming, “Congratulations!” It was anticlimactic, sudden, relieving and kind of jarring.
What now?
What now?!? Oh, that one is easy: Get back to living. Put it behind you. Move on. Appreciate what you’ve been through, but go forward. Get back in your car and head home. Worry about something else. Normal things, like dentist visits and root-rot fungus and those horrible, awful squaw lines. See you in six months, and then it will seem even more routine and anticlimactic.
“Whooeee!” I thought. Or maybe it was something else that can’t be published here.