Back to Work

I feel okay today.

Now, there’s a statement I honestly feared I’d never make again. But I do. Feel good, or at least pretty good.

Just two days ago, I honestly thought I would never feel worse. I was tired, shaky, nauseous, breathless and too weak to walk…the way I’d pretty much felt for the last couple of months, only worse. I figured it went with the territory.

My wife drove me to the VA for my regularly scheduled chemotherapy session.
It didn’t work out. As soon as a nurse took my vital signs, I was hurried to the ER. My blood pressure was 70/42. That’s low.

I’m not going to go into the diagnosis except to say that low blood pressure was partly a result of the cardio surgery I had a couple of weeks ago and partly caused by the fact that I was taking medicine that had been prescribed a year ago to lower my blood pressure. I wasn’t drinking enough liquids.

Anyway, I spent the day in the ER, on my back on a stretcher-bed with an IV something stuck in my chemotherapy port. By the late afternoon, I felt pretty good, able to walk. Yesterday was good and so is today.

Over the last few weeks – since my mother died – I’ve not been able to write much of anything. Oh, a lot of that inability stemmed from my physical condition but a lot of it was a reaction to my mom’s death. It just seemed that I couldn’t get my thoughts off my mother, largely because I hadn’t been able to visit her before her passing.

Stretched out in the hospital two days ago, though, I had something of a breakthrough. I realized, that my mother would be appreciative of my sadness, appreciative that I missed her and was going to keep missing her. She would have been enraged, though, if I allowed that perfectly natural sorrow to stand between myself and the writing I still want to do before my own death. "Stop it!" she’d say. "Get back to the computer. Show me you loved me by writing a good book."

My mother was proud of me. I know that. She was happy and proud and thankful that I’d fought my way from a terribly sick and sad and drunken life to a decent life. A life that included her and also includes a wife and my grown up children and my grandchildren. A life that includes some success as an author. A life filled with friends I’ve made since I took my last drink. But she wants me to finish the writing I started two years ago because she knows that’s what will make this period of my life make some kind of sense.

Mom, Again

My mother is home from the hospital. The doctors wanted her to stay a few more days, but she vetoed that idea and checked herself out on Friday. It seems she has three very small growths in the left hemisphere of her brain.

The growths, it seems, are little, nasty offspring of a larger, older cancer somewhere in my mother’s body. The experts don’t know where that older, primary cancer is lurking.

This sounds strange, I know, but it seems it is not rare for cancer cells to be found of undetermined origin. The doctors might, they say, find out if Mom was willing to undergo a lot of tests. She’s not and I understand completely.

She’ll be getting some outpatient, radiology treatment for the next couple of weeks and then, as much as is possible, go back to the routine life of a 92-year-old woman.

I just spoke with her on the phone. Her speech is still a bit confused and confusing, but better than it was. She’s in bed, tired, she said, but okay.

A lot of people who don’t know Mary Doherty have been praying for her. Friends in the fellowship. Women I know at the grocery store. A barber I visited on Thursday. Lynne’s many friends. Worshipers at three churches, maybe four.

The prayers seem to be working.

Here’s what I mean:

My mother is still able to do the New York Times crossword puzzle, an activity she truly loves. She has a tough time talking – making all the words she actually says match the words she’s thinking when she speaks – but there seems to be no cleft between her thinking and writing.

That may be a miracle.

That’s all I’m going to write about my mother, at least for a time.

Mom

My phone rang yesterday afternoon. It was my brother, Pat, the lawyer in Clearwater. He called with the news that my mother was in the hospital. I wasn't really surprised. You see, my ninety-two year old mom has recently been a bit confused when she and I spoke on the phone. For the last few weeks, she seemed always to be searching for words, sometimes saying things that didn’t make sense.

I’d already talked to Pat about her problem. He sees her almost every day. He had noticed the same things but knew there was no way we could force her to go to a doctor, at least not yet. He said he would watch her carefully, but for now he would let it pass. I agreed.

We were wrong.

My mom, Mary, telephoned Pat in mid-morning yesterday. When she spoke, nothing she said made any kind of sense at all. Oh, she was able to talk, and to say real words, but the words she said had nothing to do with anything. She might want to say mailbox and instead, she’d say ice cream bar or puppy dog.

And she was terrified.

Pat took mom to the hospital in town where the doctors quickly diagnosed her problem as something called aphasia.

Pat explained what aphasia really is, but I didn’t get it. I was too worried about my mother and wondering what the hell I should do. Later, after we hung up, I looked it up online and discovered that it is a language disturbance caused by a lesion of the brain, making an individual partially or totally impaired in her ability to speak, write, or comprehend the meaning of spoken or written words.

Mom was held overnight. I spent most of the night worrying, sure she was either going to die or end her life in a nursing home. Some time around midnight, I decided to reschedule my next chemo so Lynne and I could rush up to be with her.

This morning, I found out that aphasia often cures itself and doesn’t last a long time. In fact, my mother is already somewhat better. A few moments ago, she and I spoke on the phone and even laughed together. Some of what she said didn’t make sense but that was okay and it will probably pass. She even thinks she’ll be able to keep working the New York Times crossword each day and that’s a relief.

So I feel better today. And that’s good. You see, I’ve been having a rough go since my last chemotherapy. It’s more than two weeks now and I am just starting to feel good enough to want to write anything at all. My appetite has returned enough that I don’t have to force everything down my throat and I'm not forced to spend the entirety of each day in bed.

Of course, my mother knew I’d been having a rough time, so before we quit talking, she asked me how I was doing. I told her I felt okay. I also told her Lynne and I would be up to visit her as soon as possible.

My mother asked me if I have any more chemo scheduled and I told her I did, in just a week, and she told me not to worry about her, that she would be fine.

"Hell," she said, "just stay home and take care of your damn self for a while."

I laughed.

Now, you might think that rough language was caused by my mom’s bout of aphasia. It wasn’t.

That’s the way my mother – a bright or maybe brilliant retired English teacher/librarian – talks.

Not always, but sometimes and only with me. She once explained to me that she talks that way because she’s retired, never in a classroom or library, and she gets to cuss a bit when she feels like it.

When I heard her words, I really felt relief because I truly knew she was already recovering.

Damn, it made me feel good.

Mother's Day

This Moher's Day stuff is a day or so early, I know. Not much, but enough to know that it will be on line just in time for my brothers to read it and wish they’d thought of it. My mom won’t read it. She has a computer that she used two or three times about two years ago when it was brand new. Now it’s under her desk, behind the typewriter with which she writes letters. That she bought used about 50 years ago.

I do want to talk about Mom, though.

I think I’ve already said here that she and I have a very special relationship, and we do.

I was adopted as a baby. I was a premature, very sick baby, only about three pounds at birth. My biological mother died in that childbirth. As far as I’m concerned, my biological mother was a wonderful, beautiful, good woman. My dad – whoever he was – was probably in the military as World War II came to an end. Maybe he died doing something heroic.

That’s what I choose to believe.

The people who adopted me – my mom and dad – really thought I’d die. That’s how tiny I was, how sick. But they took me anyway, to give me some love.

My dad is dead now, has been for a long time. I loved him. I love him. But he and I were never really close.

My mom and I were – and are.

Many of my happiest memories are of my mother. I thought she was beautiful and loved it when she’d hold my hand as we walked together. I remember the way she looked when we went to mass as a family and remember her giving me books and telling me, from the time I was a little boy, that I could become a writer if I wanted to.

I remember the late, late night when she learned her dad – my grandfather – had died. My father was working and my mom came to my room and woke me. She was sitting on the floor crying so I got out of bed and hugged her and cried with her and then, later, we went to the kitchen and drank some hot milk and just kind of looked at each other.

I remember her being angry from time to time. I don’t remember her ever hitting me. I do remember her making me stand in a corner for a time and remember my father’s punishments.

Whew.

I remember sitting on the floor in the kitchen on Saturdays, listening to the opera broadcast from New York as she did the weekly ironing. I remember sitting on her lap.

She’s 94 now, a retired teacher/librarian. She – whom I remember as being almost 6-feet tall – is tiny. A little bent over. Pretty deaf. And she uses a cane. She also drives, solo, to mass and shopping and to restaurants.

My wife thinks my mom, Mary, should not be allowed to drive. She’s too old. I told Lynne to go up to Clearwater and take my mother’s car keys. I’ll wait here.

My mom reads voraciously. The New York Times and the big New York Review of Books and a couple of other newspapers and more than a dozen magazines and every book she’s interested in. Not novels. Nonfiction. Good stuff.

I talk to my mother every evening at 6 p.m. I make sure she’s okay and we talk about the Times crossword puzzle and we talk about politics and our family and all kinds of things. She tells me what she did and I maybe tell her what I did.

We sound a lot alike, my mother and I. We laugh at the same jokes, find the same political actions disgusting, feel the same way about people we know, like the same food, even curse with a lot of the same words.

We can sit together and not say a damn thing and both know we’re having fun.

Sometimes, when I’m having a tough time, I edit my comments. I can tell how sad she is that I’m sick and I don’t want her to know everything.

I hope she has a good Mother’s Day and wish I had the strength to drive up there. But I don’t and she understands. Lynne and I sent her a beautiful scarf and a book I know she wanted and she already opened the gifts because she never waits these days. She loves the gifts.

Thinking of her as I lay in bed earlier today, I thought how good it would be if she dies before I do. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever admitted in a life that’s been filled, for years, with some terrible actions and reactions. But it’s true.

And guess what. I believe my mother hopes the same thing.

Mom

I returned not long ago from another trip to see my mother up in Clearwater. This one – the second in a couple of weeks – was for three full days. While I was at my mom's house, I was joined by my older brother, Kevin, but he only stayed for one day and night.

He had a stroke about a year and a half ago and, to put it simply, he’s not doing very well. An athlete for most of his life, he’s now stuck, unable to walk without help, unable to hold a thought or a fork.

He’s miserable and letting the misery get in the way of any efforts he might make to improve his lot. So, after just a day, he decided to go home where, I guess, he can be miserable in peace.

Enough about him. I love him, but I didn’t go up to Clearwater to help him. I went up to help myself.

You see, since Lynne has gotten ill I’ve not been doing well myself. I wake at the same time every day, go to my fellowship meeting, go to Publix, come home, work for an hour or so, then go to bed. In the afternoon, I get up for a couple of hours, then go back to bed. At night, I watch television for too many hours, take my drugs and pass out.

I haven't had a lot of positive days recently. I needed an uplift.

I tell you the trip up to see my mother was wonderful. Or at least the very last day, when mom and I were alone.

In fact, it was one of the very best days I have enjoyed for a long, long time.

We hung out together, talked and laughed, went out for a late lunch, talked some more. We remembered stuff that happened when I was a kid, a little kid. We talked about the way I brushed her hair in the evening so she could relax and about the way we’d hold hands when we walked to Roman Catholic mass early in the morning and how, too, she found money, somehow, to buy me a book every week or so and told me I could be a writer it that’s what I wanted.

The best memory for me was of Saturday afternoons, many, when - as a little kid - I’d sit on the floor beneath an ironing board my mom lowered from a little door in the kitchen. For a couple of hours, then, as my mother ironed my dad’s dress shirts and the uniform shirts my brothers and I wore to Catholic school, we’d listen together to opera broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

She doesn’t often listen to opera these days. Her hearing is just too bad. Still, once in a while I’ll put a Pavarotti CD on her little player and turn it up as loud as it can go so she can hear at least little bits and pieces. Like me, she loves Nessun Dorma, from Puccini’s Turandot.

The worst part of the visit was Tuesday night when we said goodbye. My mother knows I’m not doing well. As we hugged we both wept. The last time we cried together – that I remember – was many years ago, early one morning just after she got a phone call that her father was dead. My dad was already at work and my mom came to my room to tell me. I was eleven years old, then. I was old enough to know that Imy mother needed someone to comfort her and I did, too.

When my mother and I hugged on that Tuesday night, I realized how little things have changed

* * *

I’m having troubles with my memory these days. A little while ago, I wanted to write the word "gutter." Why isn’t really important. What’s important is that I couldn’t remember the word "gutter." I could imagine a gutter. Could remember playing in the ones in Chicago when I was a little kid in a gang that seemed to love gutters. I could almost smell a gutter. I just couldn't think of the damn word.

Okay, I know that everybody forgets little things from time to time. But mine seems more serious than that because it’s much more frequent and involves things I should never forget. A day or so ago, I couldn’t remember my best friend’s wife’s name. Yesterday, I talked to a woman I’ve known for 20 years and – in the middle of our conversation – I called her by the wrong name. In a conversation with Lynne, when I got ready to call her by name, my mind went blank.

The experts tell me this is the result of the chemotherapy and the drugs I’m taking. At first, it made me very angry. Then I realized that if I simply chilled out the word I was looking for would reappear.

It’s kind of a problem when I’m writing but I’ve figured a way to deal with it. When I reach a spot in anything I’m writing and can’t find a specific word I believe should be part of the manuscript, I simply type a vile word that starts with "s" and ends with "t". I do that because I figure I’ll never use that word in either my memoir or novel. Then, later, I do an automatic search and replace the nasty words with the missing words that have been magically restored to my memory.

Oh, yes, I was going to use a word that begins with "f" and ends with "k" but figured there were too many copies of that word in both the memoir and the novel.