Infinity's Origin
Zoom out. Zoom in. How do we find our way as caregivers of loved ones—across months, years, or even decades?
When mom phoned me in 2006 to tell me the news, I sat in a white plastic lawn chair inside my north bedroom. The Continental Divide rose silently on the horizon outside the window. Our new nontoxic, healthy home was still airing out, so I spent much of my time in the smallest room in the house next to an air filter or outside in the forest.
My health challenges had brought me and my husband at the time to this mountainside within driving distance of his job yet far enough from the city to plant roots in a place with good air and water.
My mom described the doctor visit, explaining what I hadn’t caught until that moment: She’d had specific blood tests done since 1989 when she had breast cancer. So, by 2006, her record would show anomalies across the years, such as a high protein level in her blood.
I felt fuzzy that afternoon. Some reactions to the house and lack of sleep. I remember needing to concentrate to track her words: Multiple Myeloma. I need to figure what to do. I don’t think I should stay in Albuquerque. I may need to move closer to you or your brother.
But he’s in a different country.
I—what do you think about me moving to Colorado?
I felt constriction in my heart. My stomach knotted. I couldn’t believe my mom had cancer again. I had been her caregiver at age 18 through the 1989 episode of breast cancer when she had a mastectomy a week before Christmas. Later she got the all clear—no chemo or radiation. We were largely spared.
But then in 1991, to prepare for my brother’s wedding, she had TRAM flap surgery, where a surgeon does a tummy tuck and moves that flesh up to craft a new breast. The belly button can become a stylized nipple.
Her surgery went fine, but the surgeon hadn’t given her any fluids, even though she had been open as long as any male patient during open heart surgery. (Her TRAM flap was one of the first of a few done in Grand Rapids, MI.)
I went home. But they called me back to the hospital. She was thrashing and fighting the doctors and nurses. “Is this normal?” they asked.
“No!” I said. I soon came toe to toe with the doctor, my anger a tsunami of red.
“Her electrolytes seem to be low,” he said. “We could give her fluids. Or we could just wait and see what happens. It might be something else. I don’t know what’s happening.”
“NOW! Start them NOW!” I yelled.
He covered himself, turtle-shell silence, shuffling off to place the order.
My mom went into a coma for four days. Tortuous days, where I didn’t know if she would live. My world spun, the revelry and music of a local festival humming many stories down from the hospital room. I waited. Friends visited. But I spent hours alone by my mother’s bedside bargaining with “God”—in a timeless bubble, hoping, worrying, holding my mom’s hand, monitoring her care.
Finally, she woke up and recovered well, except for some memory loss. We were all incredibly relieved. But the whole ordeal left me with PTSD.
On that call in 2006, a flash flood of emotions pummeled me downstream as I sat in that white plastic chair. I had been her rock in 1989 and 1991. But it had taken me years to gain independence from her and (somewhat) deal with those traumas.
Would I be willing to do that again for her now?
That question, unspoken, hung between us.