...you watch in horror as your own blood starts spurting out. Good-bye October. Good-bye Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Good riddance to bad rubbish. That is my standard reply when someone asks me about my breast cancer experience--the remission of which is now nine years old. I don't like to talk about my ordeal and I will now tell you why.
First, cancer sucks. There is no other way to say it. I prefer to keep the details of it hidden, kind of like when someone is pregnant with their first child. You don't want to scare them too much about labor and delivery, so you try to leave it to their imagination. But pretty much, labor and delivery also suck. The difference is that after labor and delivery, you are stuck with a clean and pink and perfect angel. After cancer, you get your old life back. But not quite. Gone are the days of carefree living. Gone are the hedonistic longings of a younger life. You are just thankful everyday to be able to walk around on this planet one more time. Nothing really rattles you. Got cut off in traffic? Oh well, at least you are not getting off the elevator and looking for the nuclear medicine suite. Someone short with you in a store? Well, perhaps they were in the wrong. But they are nothing compared to the nurse telling you that she can't find a vein to stick the needle in, after puncturing your skin five times. Some company messed up on your billing statement? No prob. Waking up your husband at midnight because you accidentally cut through the tubing that is your chemo port which dangles out of your body like some weird science experiment? Now that is a problem. You have such an old school device as a chemo port because the first internal port they surgically put inside of you dislodged somehow and you had to get it surgically removed. And on the off chance that the same thing could happen again, you talked your doctor in this dangling monstrosity. Later, you decided to clean the tubing up, as there is old surgical tape on it from when you were in the hospital. The tape will not come off, so you get a pair of cutical scissors and begin to carefully remove it. However, the tape and the tubing are the same dreadful greyish white color. Before you can stop yourself, you have sliced right through the tubing and you watch in horror as your own blood starts spurting out. Then, because you can't stop the blood from spurting, you awaken your spouse who has learned some first aid through all of this and clamps it up. Now you have some piece of hardware that was once in your husband's tool box in the garage dangling from your port tubing. You will need to call your doctor first thing in the morning and explain all of this. Then you remember that in your great teaching career, you are scheduled to give the statewide exam the next day, and there will be no break, nor any time to make a personal phone call. And you have been told to not call in sick unless it is an emergency. You try to calculate whether or not this crisis counts as an emergency. Probably it does. But you do not have any sick days left, and you need your paycheck. Not to mention the fact that if you are at the doctor in the middle of the day, who will pick up your kids from school? You give the call job to your mother and appear at work the next day. Your mother, who doesn't understand the ins and outs of the importance of school testing, ends up going all Shirley McClaine from "Terms of Endearment" on the phone to the nurse in charge. You get a message later that day that says your doctor would be pleased to see you whenever you can make it in. And that, my friends, is one of the many reasons why I don't tell all about my cancer experience. It's too much to believe that it actually happened to me. And it's way too much information to share. She went as a mermaid. No surprise there. My daughter had gone as a mermaid on Halloween for the previous two years. That year marked her third time to pay homage to the goddess of the sea. And that year also marked one of my most favorite Halloween memories.
My son, on the other hand, could not decide on a costume that year. I suggested doing a classic Halloween costume--ghost, skeleton, or Dracula. He reminded me that he had already gone as both a skeleton and a vampire in previous years. Halloween grew closer on the calendar. I got set to perform a sheet transformation into a ghost, but I didn't have a plain white sheet. And when I priced them in the stores, it seemed an outrage to purchase one and then cut it up immediately for a costume. The day before Halloween, in Walmart, I had an inspiration. I was buying toilet paper when it dawned on me. Why not a mummy? It seemed simple enough. We could just wrap him up in toilet paper and get on with it. It seemed so simple it was a wonder I never thought of it before. So simple that I never bothered to look up directions for a mummy costume on the internet or at the library. My son has never been too much in awe of Halloween. Oh, he'll participate, but it just never seemed like he had his whole heart in it, even as a little kid. He doesn't care for crowds. And the spookiness of the holiday used to really get to him. I am with him on that one. I don't like surprise scares either. And we share a general hatred of moths which flitter around light bulbs in October. And what does every home do on October 31st? Leave their porch light on for trick-or-treaters. My son's hatred of moths is worse then mine. It stems from a severe hatred of butterflies that started when he was two years old and lasted well into his early twenties. The older he got, it seemed the less he liked trick-or-treating. But like passengers on the Titanic, his dad and I maintained the fiction that it would all be alright, and the ship would right itself in the end. Then along came baby sister, and we couldn't allow her to trick-or-treat alone whilst he remained at home. On the morning of this Halloween that same sister woke up with an allergy. I gave her some medicine and packed her off to her Halloween party at preschool that morning. By the afternoon, her allergy had developed into a cold. We held a brief family counsel that evening to decide if she were healthy enough to go out trick-or-treating. She assured us she was. Her assurance was shades of things to come, for sure. Now a young adult, she has always been healthy enough to go out, or so she has said. I decided to hold off on giving her more medication until after trick-or-treating when I would administer Benadryl which I knew would put her right to sleep. My husband elected me as Mayor of Munchkinland while declaring that he would stay home and hand out candy to our neighbors' children. He handed me a glass of wine to take on our journey, and off we went, an unenthusiastic, haphazardly wrapped mummy, a sickly mermaid, and a me, their half-crocked leader. We made it to the homes directly across from us and on either side of us without incident. Then, at my urging, we began to zigzag across the street. At every zig, we were met by a cat, who we had to stop and pet. And at every zag, my daughter's nose began running ceaslessly. We had no choice but to pick off bits and pieces of my son's costume and wipe away her drippage. And so our trek continued. Ring a door bell. Pet a cat. Ring another door bell. Tear off toilet paper and wipe a nose. I became the sherpa of used nose wipes. By the end of two blocks, I was out of wine and my son was nearly out of costume. There was one more house on the corner that I insisted we approach. Foolhearty, stubborn, or just unwilling to give up so quickly--all of these were my motivating factors. The home had a large front porch which was decked out in fake spider webs and mardi gras beads. "Impressive," I thought. My kids rang the doorbell and said the requisite, "Trick-or-treat." The door began to open slowly. At first nothing was there. "Oh, great," I thought, "they're adding in a scare factor." We stared into the home's empty front hallway. What seemed to be eons passed while we stood transfixed, unsure as to what we should do. Leave? Keep waiting? What could be taking this person so long? Finally, a dark, shadowy figure appeared from behind the door. As she emerged into the light of the one bulb porch lamp she turned out to be a rather large woman dressed in a shiny caftan. She was wearing a mardi gras mask. My son began to scream. My daughter followed suit. It was only then that I got a good look at the woman's mardi gras mask. It held the shape and style of a Monarch butterfly, complete with oversized orange and black feathers. The screaming continued into cries of agony. No longer surprised, the children now registered cries of general frustration, as in "How could you do that to us?" I stuttered, "He's afraid of your mask." The lady removed it. She looked shocked. She couldn't believe she could have caused so much anguish. She began to apologize, but to no avail. The wailing continued. All I could think of to do was to get them out of there as fast as possilbe. We fled the scene without candy or prizes. Regrouping in the street, I called my husband on my cell phone. "Mayday!" I shouted into the phone. "No one is hurt. At least not physically." He offered to come get us in the car. "No, that's o.k. We're actually just around the corner. Just come meet us," I told him. We met up with him at the crossroad of our street and the one with the house of horrors on it. Bouyed by the appearance of their dad out of the darkness, the kids began to calm down. We headed home and went in the house. I looked at the clock. "Damn. Only 7:30," I said. "It feels like it ought to be at least midnight." I was going to publish a series of Halloween posts this week leading up to Halloween. However, this weekend the pipebomber was found, and then there was a mass shooting at a Synogogue. I felt it would have been slipshod of me to not acknowledge our nation's tragedies in some way. I hope it is not too soon to make a social commentary on these events. Even more, my prayer goes out to all who were affected. I was reminded of a poem I like that was once discussed in a teacher workshop. I remember that agreement could not be met with the poem's actual meaning. I love the ending of this poem, and although it has nothing to do with mass shootings, the overall effect of it does indeed. So with apologies to Mr. Frost.... |
AuthorKaren Schwabenland--Keeper of a daily blog of written matter, reporter of events large and small, and charlatan extraordinaire Archives
September 2022
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