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

It’s been a while since I wrote anything at all. I was sicker than usual for a time and ultimately had to undergo vascular surgery at the VA hospital in Miami. I was – and still am – so weak I can barely walk.

Not long after the surgery, my mother died.

I wasn’t surprised. She was 92 years old. She’d been ill and weak. I do wish I’d not been sick so I could have made my way up to Clearwater on Florida’s West Coast to see her one more time before she slipped away. But it didn’t work out that way.

My brother Patrick told me about her death. She told him, he said, she was ready to go. His daughter, Maura, told me my mother had said the same thing. My mother said she was tired. She said she wanted to be with my father who died about a decade ago. "No more," she said. Then she stopped eating and stopped taking her meds.

I can understand. I really can.

It’s easy for me to imagine my mom on her deathbed, quiet, unmoving, her eyes closed. For a time after her death, that’s the way I thought of her. Then I stopped. Now, when I think of her, I remember the last time I saw her, a couple of months ago. We sat at the table in her family room, talking about politics and my work and laughing a lot. She told stories about family in Ireland and friends in Chicago.

The last night I was with her, ready to drive home very early in the morning, we embraced. She kissed my cheek and I kissed hers. We told each other to be safe. "I love you, Mom," I said. She said the same to me. When we pulled apart, I could see her eyes were wet with tears. She smiled and nodded her head. I knew what she was saying with that smile and nod. That’s what I’ll remember.

Mom and Me

My mother is in rehab now. She had surgery about a week ago and is already up, walking (with help), and dealing with her granddaughter’s death about as well as can be expected.

I call her on the phone a couple of times a day. I wish I could get up there, but I’m too sick from the chemo. Yesterday, when I called and asked for mom, a nurse told me she was in the beauty parlor. For reasons that have nothing at all to do with beauty, that was the best news I’d had in while.

# # #

Not surprisingly, I’ve been getting some psychiatric and psychological help for about a year now. It was recommended by one of my chemotherapy nurses after I spent a long chemo session talking about my feelings.

The psychiatrist, whom I really like and admire, doesn’t have me stretch out on a couch or anything like that. We talk for a bit and he makes comments, but he’s really more involved in prescribing drugs than in anything like psychotherapy, and that’s okay with me.

I was in therapy once, for one session. The doctor made a big deal out of telling me I could tell him anything at all and it wouldn’t bother him, and that sounded good to me. So I told him something. I don’t remember what it was (this was about 40 years ago) but it must have been pretty bad because when I looked at the shrink his face was twisted with disgust.

So much for that.

This may come as a surprise to most who know me, but I’m not crazy, or not really crazy. I don’t want to take my own life or harm anybody else, I don’t hear voices, and I have no ideas at all that I am Napoleon or Captain Hook or Al Capone.

I guess that means I don’t really need to see a shrink. What I do need is help dealing with the things are happening in my life, to me and – even more – to people I love. I am sad and sometimes scared. I’m angry. I can’t sleep without aid. I have no energy to speak of. My memory is full of troublesome holes. But I’m not crazy.

That’s where Linda comes in. I call her my therapist though the VA gives her some other title.
She and I have a good relationship. I see her at least twice a month and I am able to tell her the truth without worrying about her judgments. We like each other. She’s helped me accept the truth and know that my feelings are to be expected and are justified.

I saw her last week and when I told her about my mother’s hospitalization and my niece’s suicide she didn’t hide her reaction or retain her professional detachment. She blurted a short sentence that you might expect to hear from a carpenter after he hammers his thumb.

I started to weep, something I’ve been doing a lot of in the last few days. She simply let me cry. And that was okay. I told her what I was feeling and she nodded and she said, "Of course you’re sad and frightened and angry. You should be."

She also told me I needed to focus more on myself. I know the truth of that. I have to take care of myself.

I’m not trying to sound like a candidate for sainthood. But she’s right. I haven’t been thinking about myself…at least not as much as I usually do. "Be nice to yourself," Linda said.

To be honest, right now there aren’t many ways I can be nice to myself. I’ve no appetite to speak of. I don't drink anymore. I can’t go sailing or walking. My libido has left town.

But I can read.

So I went online and ordered two of Garrison Keillor’s books – the only ones I didn’t already have in the stack by my bed.

The books arrived yesterday and I’ve already devoured one. It was wonderful to spend time in Lake Woebegon instead of in my own head.

The Worst Year Ever

I’m going to say it started 12 months ago. That might not be correct. It may have been 13 months or maybe just 51 weeks or so. To keep things simple, I put the beginning at a year ago. I mean the beginning of the worst year ever.

I have cancer, of course. Terminal cancer. And I’ve had it longer than a year. About two-and-a-half years would be correct. It’s not surprising that the cancer is much worse now that I’ve been ill as long as I have. I get chemotherapy pretty regularly and it’s as bad as you’ve heard. That, too, has gotten worse in the last year.

Then there’s my brother, my older brother, Kevin. He had a stroke this last year. A one-time football player and a long-distance bike rider, he’s now stuck in a wheel chair, barely able to stand, unable to use his right arm. His dental practice? Kaput. My kid brother had cancer, now in remission. Lynne was ill, in and out of hospital several times. And now my mother's in the hospital with a broken hip and some strange mental condition that makes it impossible for her to clearly verbalize her thoughts.



This was exactly how far I’d written in this blog/journal entry a couple of days ago when my phone rang. It was my niece, my kid brother's daughter, calling from Clearwater. At first I thought she was calling about my mother. She wasn’t. She called to tell me that another of my nieces, Monica, had visited my mom for several hours, left my mother’s room to go to mom’s house, where she, Monica, was staying. Everything seemed fine. It wasn’t. For some reason I guess we’ll never know, Monica – an attorney, a beautiful young woman, smart and funny, much loved by her family – went into my mother’s bathroom and hanged herself.

What can I say or write? I feel terrible for my big brother, Kevin, and for Monica’s mother Mary Anne and her stepmother, Roz. I feel terrible for Monica’s brothers and sisters and cousins. I tremble at the thought of what this horrible news will do to my mother and am only writing this because I know she has no access to this blog.

I want to curse. I try to pray and I can’t except to tell my Higher Power that I’ve had enough, the family has had enough, leave us alone, please!

I talked to a priest yesterday, Father Bob. He went to Jesuit High School in Tampa with me and now serves at my mother’s parish. He said that his belief was that when someone took her own life, she was saying: "God, I’m in so much pain and trouble I simply can’t take it any more. I’m turning it over to you." That terrible last act, then, becomes a sort of prayer. Maybe someday that thought will really help. I can see how it could. For now, it doesn’t. I’m sad, terribly sad, and confused and frightened and angry that my niece, that wonderful girl I held on my lap and loved and whom my mom loved almost beyond belief, would do this miserable thing apparently without thought or care of what it could do to my mother, her grandmother and the rest of her family.

What I thought was the worst year of my life when I started this blog, became, in an instant, immeasurably worse.

I like to act as if I discover lessons in the situations I face. Lessons that teach me, and perhaps you, something about life or death or love or family or something worth thinking about. There’s no lesson here. None. None at all.

MJ and DI

My mother got out of the hospital last Friday (June 26), went home and broke her hip on Saturday. She somehow survived Sunday but was back in the hospital on Monday. She had surgery today (July 1) and somehow expects to be walking within a week.

At least that’s the news I got from my mother and my brother up in Clearwater. I never heard of anything like that, but, hey, it sounds good to me.

I had chemo this morning. It wasn’t bad but early in the drive home my tight lower lip went completely numb. It only took an instant for the lip to go from being normal to tingling, as if I’d been given a big pain-killer shot in a dentist’s office.

I know I should have turned back to the hospital, but I didn’t. I just wanted to go home.

I know it wasn’t the right thing to do. It worked out though. Not long after I walked into the apartment, the lip felt fine.

So far, so good. Mom seems to be okay and I’m here.

Meanwhile, I wish everybody would stop talking about Michael Jackson, his money, his DNA, his drug habit, and everything else.

I feel bad for Farrah Fawcett Major’s loved ones and followers. Thanks to The King of Pop, her passing has hardly been noticed.

The same thing happened to Mother Theresa (now Blessed Theresa of Calcutta) after her death in 1997. Diana, the Princess of Wales, died just a few days earlier and news of her passing in a brutal auto accident in Paris put the Roman Catholic nun at the back of most newspapers.

I don't know why, but this stuff bothers me. In a way, though, I enjoy it. It takes my mind off me and my mom for a bit and gives me something new to complain about.

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.