Stage Four

The Cancer Year has already begun.  Mom's story technically starts in January 1994 with two months of misdiagnosis and treatments for conditions that did not actually exist.

But to me, Her Cancer Year officially starts on March 9, 1994.  And so every March, I do relive those last moments as each anniversary unfolds ~ not in a morbid way or even a sad way ~ but in such a way for a person who has a calendar in her head and remembers key days of the week, days of the month, and days of the year.

We had been waiting for the call.  And the call came just shortly before I had to leave for work.  I remember Mom and Dad huddled together using the same hand-held phone.  Two words: lung cancer.  Words that shattered our world in a single breath.

Looking back, I wish there would have been some way for me to cancel my shift.  I did call the video store to at least ask if the morning shift person could stay a little longer.  We all worked shifts alone, and she could not stay longer.  I did not want to leave my mother or my father.  But they did not want me to lose my job.

So I left for work in a daze.  Drove 14 miles to Scotts Valley.  Started my shift at 4.  And cried between customers the whole night. 

I was wearing my favorite windbreaker ~ the torquoise one she and Dad had bought me for my trip to New York the previous summer ~ tears streaming so fast that the sleeves were saturated with sadness ~ really knowing this was the end ~ we had not even gone over concrete details and treatment plans with her doctor yet ~ still more tests ~ but I knew ~ I just knew ~ this was the end of life as I knew it ~ and at 29 years old, I knew right then that I was about to lose my mother.

I endured the six hour shift and came home after 10 p.m. later that evening.  Mom was already asleep.  Started the next day on automatic pilot with a new found strength that I never knew was within me.  Began a series of appointments with her and Dad.  Went to the cancer resource library and brought home books.  Really should not have brought home books as the information only scared her more ~ she thought she was going to have to have surgery based on the information in those books ~ she envisioned being cut open and having a lung removed ~ she studied diagrams and read information on other types of lung cancer.

She had been having pain in her back and in her ribs for two months which originally started the whole series of testing and missed diagnosis back in January.

After her official diagnosis of lung cancer in March, I went with her to the dressing room for the X-rays at Dominican, and she came out of the X-ray room all excited. 

"It's only a broken rib!" she exclaimed joyously, ''I broke a rib on the exercise machine.  That's what is causing the extra pain!"

For a fleeting moment of perhaps a few days, we thought she could really still be Stage One.  And during that moment, the situation seemed manageable, bearable, and slightly less scary.

But it was me who looked the doctor right in the eye at our next appointment and asked him what stage was my dear mother's cancer.

"Stage 4," he answered point blank.

Silence broken by winces of shock and then tears.  The three of us huddled in his little office, taping the whole conversation to fully comprehend all that he was saying later.

Any remaining hopes and dreams I had for my mother were crushed with two single words ~ Stage Four.

And so it turned out that the rib had broken from the lung cancer spreading to the bone. 

Both chemotherapy and radiation now were the plan.  And she dived right in as if the world still held all her hopes and dreams.  She believed in the 5% survival rate given to Stage 4 lung cancer patients.  She had to believe if not for herself then for her husband of nearly 34 years, her three grown children, and her two beloved grandsons.

Her Cancer Year had officially begun.  We packed our fears into our bags and traveled with her throughout this journey into this unknown world ~

Stage Four ~