The Valentine’s Day Defeat

Early on the morning of Valentine’s Day, 2016, just a few months after my diagnosis with Stage 3 colon cancer and just a few weeks into my first round of chemo, my husband dialed 911. I heard him on the phone but I was too sick to pay attention to what he was saying. In my delirium, I wondered for the hundredth time how I had ended up here: Splayed at the foot of the bed but failing yet again to make it to the bathroom.

I heard the EMTs arrive. I waited as two young men wrestled a stretcher up the narrow staircase of our house. The tall skinny one, the one in charge, called me ma’am, put a hand under my arm, loaded me onto the narrow gurney, bundled me in blankets and strapped me in. The short one was no more than a boy, as wide as the doorframe. He was the muscle. They hefted the stretcher down the stairs. How clever that it folded like a chair, the better to navigate the strew and clutter of our lives. Their professional chatter and the explanation of everything they did glazed over the fact that I was nearly naked, unkempt and stinking, like our house that smelled of shit and vomit.

Right then I vowed to move to a house with wide hallways so that my deathbed might be more easily wheeled to the ambulance.  The rose bushes outside the front door were overgrown and pricking. The twigs and leaves on the walk clogged the wheels of the stretcher. I vowed to keep up with the yard work, but cancer stops you where you are, with an unmown lawn and an unclean house, unread papers, unanswered mail, and an unexamined life.  Everything that should have been done the day before the disaster remains undone; Everything that should have been said remains unsaid.  I wasn’t surprised to see my husband at the hospital a few minutes later, but I wish I had said to him: Don’t follow me down this road. 

The past 3 weeks had been a blur of diarrhea and throwing up, and many trips to the doctor. The doctor told us that chemo came with side effects, and some people suffered more than others. Most of the nurses told us we could manage this and gave me drugs.  One nurse shook her head and said, “Hospital.” But we went home. And then things went horribly wrong. Chemo is poison, and it was poisoning me. I became dehydrated and toxic, but I could not stop: 6 months of chemo might save my life; 6 short weeks would not. I wanted to make any life-changing decisions myself: Hospital? No hospital. Hospital? No hospital. One day you have a partnership and think you’re the boss; the next day, Valentine’s Day, your partner decides for you: Hospital.

 At the small rural hospital in our town, IVs were ordered, and my oncologist paged. He admitted me to the larger hospital, 45 minutes away in Asheville. Watching my husband follow behind the ambulance, I wondered how I came to be here, a reluctant transplant in Appalachia, actually living in a place I had never wanted to visit. Looking out the back window at the unspooling highway reminded me of every summer of my childhood, sitting in the rear-facing third seat of the family station wagon while my mother drove us from Maryland to North Carolina to spend weeks with my grandparents in these mountains.

We would go visiting. We would go for long drives, and visit gravestones, farmland and old homes that were once in the family. We would visit kin still living but nearly forgotten. We would drive miles on winding roads to overlooks and look at crags and balds.  We would gather for picnics in state parks and eat fried chicken and lemon cake.  While my cousins and I re-introduced ourselves creek-side and reclaimed the old divisions of “Yankee” vs redneck, my grandmother and her sister would catch my mother up on all of the latest news. Me-mom and Aunt D had 50 first cousins, and a recounting of the births, deaths, marriages, divorces, drinking habits and arrests took most of the afternoon.

At my grandmother’s 75^th birthday party, many of these cousins visited from “down home” and I met them for the first time, some of their accents so thick that you could hear the traces of a Scottish homeland abandoned 200 years before. My mother and I looked at each other: We should write down all of their names! And get Me-mom to map a family tree! We turned our attention to other things, and away from what we had in common. So much of what she shared, we lost.

My grandmother died of colon cancer at 84. She outlived my grandfather, who she adored, by nearly 25 years.  Granddaddy died at 60 from a diet of cigarettes and red meat, which was ironic after surviving so much: The Depression and two world wars. Flu. Polio. Poverty. As a child, he worked in a meat packing plant alongside his mother and 3 siblingsand dropped out of school to work full time.  He was a butcher, and his hands and arms had the texture of petrified wood from years of working in the cold freezers. When my neuropathy was bad and knives became a dangerous tool, I remembered his hands railroaded with scars, and relearned every day the lesson of keeping bone from blade. I was a chubby child, but he could hold both my wrists in one hand and lift me easily. And tickle me until I nearly peed my pants. One summer when we were at the amusement park in Myrtle Beach, Granddaddy took me on the old wooden roller coaster. I must have been much too young because the safety bar did not hold me in and as the coaster hurtled down that first hill, I rose out of the car. Airborne. Flying. His big hand reached out, grabbed my waist and pulled me back to safety.

I had outwitted death once; I could do it again.

At the bigger hospital in town, I am whisked up the elevator to a room of my own. IVs are hooked up and would drip continuously for 7 days. I was a fall risk so if I had to use the bathroom, which I did frequently because it was colon cancer, I had to call a nurse, or an air raid siren went off when I left the bed. I was on the ward of the infirm and the sleepless where the nurses came every 20 minutes, yet when I rang for a nurse, there was never one to be found. One option seemed to be to soil the sheets, but there was no guarantee that the sheets would be changed; they were, as it turned out, only changed once that week. The other option was to master the obstacle course set up by my night nurse: Swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up; grab the IV pole and bring it with me. Lurch for the end of the bed, then for the bathroom door and dive for the toilet. Close the bathroom door—or not. Every day I worked with a physical therapist to rebuild my glute muscles so I could get off the toilet, just in case I found myself alone. 

When word came down that I would be in the hospital for a while, my husband went home to check on his business, check on the cats, check back into the life we so suddenly abandoned. He brought me some clothes: A pajama top, yoga pants, a blouse I wore to work. He apparently stood in my closet and failed to imagine what I looked like every day. It takes him weeks to notice a haircut. Should I go missing he would have a hard time describing me to a sketch artist.

But he’s showing up for this, against the odds. Men leave women with cancer at astonishing rates: In studies of “partner abandonment,” the divorce rate is 20-percent if the woman is the patient. If the man has cancer, it’s around three percent. You might think that to leave your cancer-ridden spouse is a decision that invites a public stoning, but it only marks you as a coward not a criminal. John Edwards, Newt Gingrich and John Lackey are infamous don’t-caregivers. I like to think I would be a stand-by-your-man kind of woman, that I would honor the vows we never thought we’d face: For worse, for poorer, in sickness.  I’m afraid I would betray my sex; I would get out of this myself if I could.  But not my husband. He brings me adult diapers with flowers on them and tells me I look cute. And then he drives me home.