Still breathing
After a week of stress and tension, I can breathe again. My mother has had pneumonia for the last three weeks. It started as the flu and she just collapsed. Finally, my anti-doctor mother dragged herself to our horrible GP, Dr. Olson. After a course of antibiotics, he had her come back for a follow up. There he hmm'd and poked and announced she wasn't doing as well as he had expected and he had "concern," so he took another round of X-rays to send to the local hospital. The next day, the hospital called and found "persistent density with striations," which means a CAT scan. Which isn't a big deal, unless you're talking about a woman who has smoked since college. Since getting sick, she was nearly unable to breathe at times, so my mom had quit cold turkey at the start of her illness. But she couldn't take back 30 plus years of smoking. My mother was afraid. I was afraid.
Since Dr. Olson's version of bedside manner is not smacking you in the head with the chart when comes in the room, my brother the nurse came over and explained the possibilities: a lesion (a tumor of some sort), pulmonary embolism, emphysema or just deep-seated pneumonia. We had three days to sit and worry.
I started reevaluating all my plans for the coming year, what I would do, how we would cope. My friend Diane died of lung cancer about a year and a half ago. One day at work she felt dizzy and fell down. The next day she was at stage IV lung cancer, metastasized to the brain. Six months later, she lost weight, she lost her hair, she lost herself. The last time I saw her, she was in a diaper and sprawled in a bed set up in the living room in front of a TV. Diane faintly recognized the couples on "One Life to Live," but didn't know me. She smiled blankly and called me honey while I tried not to cry. A week later she was gone.
My mother replays and resaves the last joyful voicemail from Diane every week or so to make sure it doesn't get deleted. That's all we really have left of her. I don't want that to be what I have left of my mother.
Fortunately, for now, I don't have to worry about that. No lesions, no blood clots, just deep, deep pneumonia. I took a deep breath and went back to my regularly scheduled life.
But some day I won't because there will come a day when I can't. My mother smoked. My father smokes, my sister smokes, my friends smoke. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people die from lung cancer than any other cancer type. In fact, according to 2004 data, more people died from lung cancer, even after quitting for a long time. That possibility still looms large.
I have good friends who cope with the decline of a parent. They soldier on, they stay stronger than I can ever imagine. I suppose it's because they have to, the universe doesn't really give you another choice. But I don't want to cope. I want to have the people I love in my life for as long as I can. I don't want to say goodbye until I have to. And I'd rather they not do anything to take themselves away from me.
As humans, we have a remarkable ability to deny our own mortality. Denying the gaping maw of death is probably the only way we get through the day, walk down stairs, cross streets and hop on planes without turning into quivering masses of terror. I suppose that's what happens with my loved ones who smoke. With every puff, their lungs quietly blacken and breaths shorten and they choose not to know or care. But smoking is death. It is bringing that end closer and closer and taking people I love further and further away. I feel that terror and my own lungs seize up, my heart stops beating.
For now, though, I and the people I love are still breathing and I'll be thankful for each breath.