Thousand-yard Stare

I'm back in the Bay Area for a week and a half or so. I needed some R&R, I needed to get some things in order up here, and I needed my siblings to stop relying on me for everything related to caring for my mom and start stepping up to the plate. The only way to do that was to leave. Which kills me because yesterday the docs gave my mom a big dose of prednisone and now--whew!--she can breathe relatively easily. No horrible night-long coughing jags. She actually slept all night and only started coughing around 7. Which means she got up with plenty of energy, and an appetite. She actually got up and walked around the house putting things away and putting some laundry in and entertaining a couple of visitors with some sparkle rather than just gathering her energy and enduring. I wish they'd given her prednisone a while back, when she first started complaining about the shortness of breath and the coughing, so we could've had some up time together. But at any rate: Thank God for 'roids. I'm concerned because the chemo protocol they're proposing doesn't go well with prednisone. There are all sorts of dire warnings about it. But for now, I'm happy because after spending 2.5 weeks hearing her gasping for breath and coughing so terribly that tears streamed down her face and she only slept for moments at a time, I was wrung out and desperate for relief for her. It's horrifying, cancer.

We had a terrific wind storm the other night--trees were blown down, pretty much everything not bolted to ground was moved or toppled, and the power went out at some point in the wee hours. I was sleeping so soundly, for once, that I didn't notice. Mom had stashed her oxygen machine in the bathroom off her bedroom so it wouldn't keep us awake. Problem was, it sounds an alarm when power goes out. Nobody, including Mom (who'd taken a sleep aid) heard it. My aunt, who'd been visiting, woke up and noticed it was ink black outside, no street lights, and came to wake me up. We felt our way into Mom's room, switched her over by feel to her portable oxygen tank, made sure she was OK, and went back to bed. I had to set my cell phone alarm to go off in 2.5 hours, as that's how long the portable tank lasts at her rate of usage. After that I couldn't go back to sleep. Two hours and 15 minutes later, the power came back on. I got up, switched Mom back to her oxygen machine (which we call R2-D2, R2 for short), and finally got an hour or so's sleep.

My mom is a warrior woman. Faced with a terminal diagnosis (recurrent small cell lung cancer), and given the choice of palliative radiation and chemo (with the slim chance it can push her cancer back into remission like the first time around) and hospice care, she didn't hesitate: she chose treatment. She's focused completely on achieving remission, and she wants us to focus there, too. No assuming she's a gonner. No moping around. "The focus has to be on getting me well," she said yesterday. And so we've all swallowed the magic pill. We're going to get her well. I pray nightly to a God I'm not sure hears me, and I pray on, then sleep for another few hours and get up to a pragmatic, biological dawn.

Why I haven't posted (a big fat valid excuse for my 1.3 readers)

I went to Boston with the hunky chemist. It was loads of fun. THen we went to Hawaii, which was loads more fun. On the second to the last day of that trip, we learned my mom's small-cell lung cancer was back, but just in the original single location. They started her on a chemotherapy protocol right away, and she was tolerating it pretty well. A week later, we had Thanksgiving. It was tasty. And a week after that my mom ended up in the hospital with (a) pneumonia, (b) a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung), and (c) tumors in both lungs, threatening to block her major airways. Naturally, I drove like a demon from hades to get back to my hometown--the most beautiful coastal town in California, I might add. Not a bad place to have to go to in an emergency. They kept her in the hospital a week, and now she's home, hooked up to oxygen 100% of the time and taking nine different meds each day, undergoing radiation daily (for 15 days) and then starting a different chemotherapy protocol. The cancer is incurable, but she's hoping treatment will push it back into remission for a little while, or at least shrink the tumors enough so she can breathe easier and hang around longer with us rather than in the next realm with Dad and her parents. I'm learning to be a caregiver. Lucky for me I can telecommute work. Can't so easily telecommute my relationship, so I'm rallying the siblings to be here in shifts in the periods of time when I'm gone.
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The other night Mom and I were watching television together. She was having a good day (no major bouts of coughing, energy relatively up) and wanted to catch up on a show she'd started watching halfway through a season. I have to say it's disturbing when your parent has a terminal disease and yet really loves the show "Six Feet Under." But that's not what made me feel like crying that night. What made me feel like crying that night was the sight of cornflakes falling into my cereal bowl (I was hungry and that's what was handy). For some bizarre reason I don't start tearing up at the tough stuff like Mom not being able to walk down the front porch step for the paper. What hits me hard is weird things like cereal and my email crashing and that Christmas ornament I made when I was in fourth grade and that still hangs, tattered but cheery, on our lighted fir tree.

Highs, lows

I came back from Boston, worked a little while, then decamped for Hawaii, hunky scientist by my side. We stayed on the Big Island two weeks, first exploring a volcano and lava fields at chilly, higher altitudes; then focusing on the undersea world and coffee farms at low, warm sea level. Everywhere it was humid. My skin and hair were the happiest they've ever been. We relaxed, ate fruits we've never seen (farmers market in Hilo=well-fed tourists) and bought an obscene amount of coffee so when we got back to the mainland we could be sure to maintain our SF stress levels. All in all, great fun and we got back in high spirits. Which were immediately quashed by the news that my mom's lung cancer is back. Chemo (a different drug, FDA-approved in '93 for use in relapsed ovarian and small-cell lung cancer cases) starts Monday and will happen weekly until relapse or that other fork in the cancer path. Mom says not to worry, that she has a good feeling about this treatment. She's bumming because it's taken her two years to get a decent crop of hair back, and now she's going to be a cue ball again. I am genetically predispositioned to worry, and so am working on maintaining calm. Perhaps I'll write about the nature of cell phone calls, the life-changing news we hear being conveyed and received all around us every day, as we buy our coffee and New York Times; as we walk to the gym; as we buy our groceries; as we finally, on a post-vacation Friday morning, iron the shirts that have been sitting in the ironing basket for weeks, using hot iron to smooth the wrinkled cotton and steam away the small, constant drops that fall to darken the pattern as we listen and talk.

A rambler's hors d'oeuvre

I'm taking a long weekend in Boston with the hot scientist. He's attending a conference out there on test methods for figuring out how medicines dissolve in the human system. At least that's my non-scientist understanding of it. Whoo! I'm flying out to meet him because I have scads relatives out there--which makes the fact that we're going to spend the entire time dodging obligatory relative visits sound kind of contradictory. I really want to go out there to do a bit of rambling with the man. We haven't rambled much together yet. And also, one of my favorite aunts has been under the weather lately and I'd like to see her and my uncle. This is the Greek side of my family, the side that can take grave offense if blood relations who are within 100 miles don't stop by to visit. But we have only a four-day weekend. For me, two of those days will be spent in the air. And that leaves 2 days to hang out on the Cape with my aunt and uncle, and part of Monday to walk around Boston Common and get some coffee before taking the subway to the airport. The Greeks are going to have to stop their grumbling. I love Boston in the fall. And it'll be a nice expeditioning appetizer: In two weeks we're taking 10 days of R&R in Hawaii.

Reading, Knitting, and Possibly....Writing

It's been a very long year, free-time-wise. There was a new relationship, with the hottie I currently live with (henceforth to be referred to as HB--Hottie McBrainiac--because he's hot and he's smart). There was the sick and later dying beloved dog. There was the new job, the pregnant sister, the move to San Francisco. With all that, there was little time for watching movies or reading novels. The sweater I'd begun knitting (first sweater ever!) languished in fuzzy periwinkle pieces--front, back, half a left arm. No writing got done, save for pieces required for a short-fiction class I took last spring. But slowly over the last month, somehow the days have opened up. I don't have to pack nor unpack. I don't have to be anywhere except for home, with my sweetheart, doing sweethearty things like being cozy on the couch and reading together. Or knitting while HB reads. I finished the left arm and am well into the right. Now I'm feeling like writing short fiction, which of course is why I'm posting on this blog so soon after the last post. I'm thinking of doing something frightening like writing about a character based on my late father. Eeeek.

Pilgrimage and Reckoning

The Frank Visit went about as I expected. He left poorer in cash and richer in old vinyl, and I needed a couple of days to sleep in and recover. He loved Alcatraz (kept saying he'd been "sprung" after we got back to the city). He ate like a starving Newfoundland at every American-style place we could find and loved his birthday cake. And he took a full 12 hours to get back home on what normal, road-averse drivers like me make a five-hour drive out of. But that's his standard M.O.. He's still marveling at the pile of records and CDs he found up here and speculating about when he'll make the trip next year. I'm planning my own vacation, to somewhere tropical in November.
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I found a dear old friend not long ago, or rather he found me. And then he sank from view and hearing again, so silently and swiftly that I was left re-reading our emails to see if it'd only been a dream. Over the last 10 years I'd begun to think I'd never see nor hear from him again and had accepted that, though always with resigned sadness. And then, contact! Long discussion! We caught up over the phone and pledged to talk again soon. It's not to be, I assume for the same reasons as before--all out of my control. And so I'm holding this smooth worry-stone of loss again, tumbling it from finger to finger and meditating on the nature of friendship, my expectations around it, the concepts of attachment and detachment and of love in the face of both.

Brethren

Every reading of an epistle in the Greek Orthodox liturgy starts with the word "Adelphi," which means "brethren." At my church, which is tucked into a little corner of the Bay Area, the chantor, a venerable old guy named Demitri, says the epistle with just the right mixture of wisdom, the patience of ages, and fatigue. He has a Greek accent, which ensures that everyone listens. But it's that word, "adelphi," that always draws me in. Not sure why--probably because it sounds so collegial.

I have two brethren, one younger and one older. The older one, Frank, is very slightly autistic. He's highly functioning, meaning he drives, he has a steady job, he helps our mom around the house. The younger one, John, is not slightly autistic; he's solidly black-sheepish. I never hear from him and see him only on holidays. My older brother, however, is coming to visit this weekend. Being slightly autistic, Frank has a collector's mind and a mania for detail. His focus: vinyl. Specifically, the kind that can be spun on a turntable (he recently laxened his purist views and began adding CDs to his stacks). Frank makes no bones about the fact that when he comes to see me, visiting his sister is the second best part about the trip. It's used-record-store shopping that gets center stage. Nevertheless, I've insisted that one day of this weekend be taken up with campy tourist things to do. So I booked us tickets to Alcatraz for Sunday. He says I'm going to lock him up there and leave him for life. Depending on how many record stores we go to on Saturday (the average number is four, but we've visited as many as six in one day during past visits), he may be right.

Wired, Wireless, and the Three-Eyed Baby

I feel a pesky urge to write fiction coming on, which means it's time for my first post. A bit of good news: I've established a wireless network in my shack-up chateau (wireless for me, wired for my hunky keeper, the scientist). This after much back-burner musing, front-burner tinkering, and a good measure of cursing. Finally I got frustrated and decided to stay wired for a while. But this morning I woke up with a solution in mind and it worked! Voila, a secure wireless network named after the scientist's peskiest parrot. (We have three, plus a cat. Yes, it's a zoo.) I feel victorious. On to writing about writing!

Yesterday I told my great friend A.P. that I was about to rewrite one short story and begin on another. "Oh? What about," he inquired. "A woman who finds a baby in a trash bin," I said levelly. He bit. "Really? How about we find something a little less cliched than finding a baby in a dumpster."

"Don't worry about cliche," I replied. "The baby's going to have three eyes."

A.P. said he thought he'd been smacked down. And that he enjoyed it. I love amusing A.P. The bonus is that I'd avoided a bad writing trap: talking about story topic. If I tell someone what I'm going to write about before I write it, I always abandon that story. It's screwy writer-mind stuff, but I haven't been able to help it.

Of course, the moment I told him I was going to write about a three-eyed baby, the devil-on-the-left-shoulder part of my twisted psyche started talking to me about what symbolism I could find there, and how I should at least create an exercise out of the idea. The angel-on-the-right-shoulder started arguing with the devil about not wasting my time, again, with bad ideas, and I had to go to the gym to drown the din out. Sometimes I can't stand myself.