Seldom has a phone call left me crying after. And that surprised me a bit, because I was fully expecting this call -- it was pretty much inevitable at some point. But there I was, blubbering on myself as soon as I hung up. Things feel better now, but still.
Pretty much exactly 20 years ago, my mom went to the doctor about this terrible belly pain and an increasing difficulty breathing. She knew she needed to quit smoking, but really this was just an episode of bronchitis and the combination with, probably, gallbladder trouble was making it more uncomfortable than usual. Removing the gallbladder might provide some temporary relief of symptoms, the doctor agreed, but the problem was chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, COPD. Not sure why they quit calling it emphysema, but the gist was that mom's lungs weren't pulling enough oxygen out of the air that passed through to supply her body's needs. The belly pain was her organs, gallbladder first, starting to malfunction due to the deficiency.
She spent several days in the hospital sucking up prednisone to reduce inflammation in what was left of her lungs so they'd work as well as they could. The high dosage brought on raging paranoia along with actively psychotic symptoms like hallucinations. Poor woman was in terror.
But they ramped down the meds, and she got to go home, where someone had already delivered the oxygen tank that became nearly instantly the central hub of her life. All her activities and, over time, all of her thoughts rotated around the gravitational center of that tank. When it made a noise, or an unfamiliar noise happened someplace in the neighborhood and it could be attributed to the tank, she was On Alert, asking someone to check, calling me to come running and look at it -- like I could tell or do anything, and generally panicking that the source of her survival was breaking down.
It was, of course, but the tank wasn't the problem. Over a period of about 7 years, mom's lungs just slowly turned to something like those scraps of curtains clinging to rusting rods in the windows of the abandoned house that the horror-movie kids know they shouldn't enter. She got where she couldn't wash her hair because lifting her arms was inordinately stressful on breathing. (I still don't understand why that was the case, but it surely was.) Then she stopped caring whether anyone else would come wash her hair either.
Her appetite dwindled, because she did nothing but sit & breathe all day, watching Oprah-class TV or reading comparable mass market litterature. Then her eating declined further, because it was so tough to breathe while chewing. And anyway, food offered her no pleasure anymore and had become another of the substances the doctor prescribed that she was required to take. For a while, since I worked free-lance and could schedule time as I wanted to, I would run over at noontime occasionally, stopping at a great deli that she had really liked for sandwiches, and try to coax her to eat half of hers and some of the potato salad. It was a ritual to do this out in the living room, which required her to get up off the bed and make her way out. Those were nice times.
Early on, she did some physical therapy, including walking on a treadmill to build up some kind of endurance, to the extent she could. Her smoking was exacerbated by a habit of doing nothing but sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee in the morning and Diet Coke through the rest of the day. Despite whatever small efforts she could make, the disease did what it does, and one April Tuesday at 2 in the afternoon, I got a phone call from the emergency room. My car was disabled at that point, but fortunately the hospital was located maybe a couple miles from my house. I said I'd hop one of the kids' bikes and run over, but my step-dad said I didn't absolutely need to be there, it's just that they had "called a code blue on her" and whatever. (I didn't know what that code meant at the time.) I said don't be ridiculous. It's a couple miles, I'll be there in a few.
He & I sat there waiting for word, and I said to him, "I wonder if this is what it will be like when she finally goes." The previous week had been a really tough one, although I had been over Sunday and heard mom speak glowingly about how fabulous Friday had been, how the two of them had chatted and watched some movie and just enjoyed one another's company. It was nice to see her talk through a big old grin the whole time, especially as the strain of the caretaking routine had worn away both of their nerves. But that Tuesday, about 10 seconds after I speculated on what the final experience would be like, a deeply concerned nurse approached and said the doctor wanted to talk with us in a room off the corridor outside. Probably every ER has that little family room where the doctor and pastor on duty can give the family the sad news, something I'd never suspected until that day.
So here's this call from my nephew last Wednesday, telling me my sister is at the ER with difficulty breathing and unbearable belly pain. And there I see her, a smoker since her mid-20s just like mom was, standing at the beginning of that same long, miserable downhill slide to the point that she might have to make the decision that it's not worth taking that next breath and better just to let go, also just like mom did. That's worth crying about.
Friday brought better news, when I felt like the cold I'd been fighting was well enough to risk visiting the hospital. No way did I want to take my germs among a bunch of people already struggling with health problems. I found my sister pink with O2 repletion and moving around with thoughts of going home the next day, and probably without that hideous monster of a tank waiting to take ownership of her life. She's nowhere near as sick as mom was when she finally broke down and went to the doctor to get that annoying gallbladder removed. She has enough health in the tank to do something positive about it and at least extend her string of good days.
If I ever again see a cigarette anywhere near her, however, she'll know without a doubt that she done wrong. It's been 13 years since mom died, and I'm nowhere near ready to start that fucking ride again.