I found myself returning to the hospital today to have last minute paperwork completed by my health care providers there. These last minute finicky details have had me grumbling, wishing back my small company of a few months ago...they didn't have nearly so many checkpoints such as these...but then I look at the twenty-one grand-bill my butt has charged and remember that there are perks to those large companies that provide kick-ass benefits.

Dad took me there to the hospital...I cannot drive, really. Stupid place for a boo-boo. It's hard returning to the UW for these things...that was Mom's hospital. That's the Cancer hospital. With my chosen HMO, I should be going to St. Mary's...but my doctor still feels I need Cancer experts working on my case. I'm scared out of my wits.

I received my packet from the geneticist the other day. My oncological surgeon made certain to refer me to the very same geneticist who reviewed Mom's case in 2004. Brenda kept a file of all their 2004 findings, and reviewing them yesterday, found the odds of Mom's illness recurring among her family members to be 1,000,000 to 1. Yet, my doctor tells me she's no longer willing to believe what they know. Nick thinks I ought to take up gambling...the odds looking to be in my favor and all.

Not that life comes with guarantees or anything, but it would be so lovely to receive a clean bill of health...to know that the ache of recovery is leading somewhere pain free. My grandmother is in the hospital right now...a UTI that's spread to her kidneys and who knows where else. She keeps falling...Dad's talking assisted living. Great...the badness of luck has spread to the other side of the family...woo! Aunt Debbie says come New Year's Eve, she's going to guzzle a whole bottle of Asti and celebrate the end of the worst year on record.

My grandmother feeds on drama, she love people calling her hospital room and visiting her...feeling sorry for her. I happen to be the opposite...the less people who see me at less than 100%, the better. I don't want phone calls while I'm in pain...I don't want to make small talk when it hurts...I don't want people to visit because whether I'm up to the task or not, I'll put on the exhausting face of nonchalance and good health.

I get that from Mom...that booger. I've always been proud that I inherited my mother's softness, sweetness, and love of expression...but I got the other junk too. Thanks a lot, Mother. That trait of hers that irritated me so...she never let people know how badly she felt, and they never knew how rapidly the disease was spreading. Her sister saw her in early January, and chided us for leading her to believe that Mom was dying and soon. She was angry at our urgent call for a final visit—she thought we were being overly dramatic. Mom passed away two and a half weeks later.

Dad and I discussed this earlier today, and he put me in my place as only a parent can do. "That was your mother," he said, agreeing she was both bullheaded and heroic up until the very end. He agreed that he, too, was very afraid where my road of health care was headed. But he reminded me of time's cruelty, too. "She didn't want to meet Nick until she was better, remember? She was determined she was going to pull through, and she didn't want him to see her down...it's sad that he never got to really know her." Yes, and it will always be one of those great regrets...that I didn't force the meeting...I guess a part of me wanted to believe she was going to pull through, too.

For a person who doesn't believe in regrets, I seem to be swimming in a lot of them lately. I found an old email from Mom last week:

03.20.05
It is Sunday night and I am home alone. I just got home from Debra and Brenda's. We had a nice birthday dinner for Debbie. I was just looking at websites to hats/scarves. Go to headcovers.com see if there are any there that you like. I don't quite know what to do - get a wig (seems like a pain), get a hat or two or get scarf, or go without anything. Isn't it funny how we worry about how we look so much. I should be ashamed. But, I'm too busy being scared right now to be ashamed.

I love you so much...and I miss you. The house feels emptier with you back in North Carolina...come home again soon, ok? I need my best friend.
Mom

And I'm led to wonder why I ever moved away. My dear friend, Sarah, once cheered to me, "I am so happy for you...this is the only thing you've ever done JUST for you!" And years later, I feel like the most ungrateful, selfish child who ever graced this life. I didn't know that after I moved away the fairy tale would be irrevocably broken. My time in NC enriched me personally—I fulfilled a lifelong dream of escaping Wisconsin and Winter, after all—but it wasn't until I left that the ache for the Midwest began to take hold of my heart. I had three years of feeling completely homeless, yet my patience (read: stubbornness) prevented me from returning to my home state sooner. Was I wrong? Did I know what I had before I left? Damn that hindsight being 20/20!

I'm a big believer of the "bigger plan" theory...everything does happen for a reason, even if we're too small to understand why. It drives my loved ones bonkers, but it keeps me going. So many now, so many intimate with the details of my bad luck chain of events, have suggested that something big and great is coming my way, and I've needed a couple years of misfortune to appreciate whatever it may be. I remember Nick talking to my pastor during Mom's visitation...saying how bad he felt that really my mother's impending death is what enabled him to come to know me. Her illness caused me to leave NC, added to why Miles left, and left me needing a shoulder...I was blessed to find so much more. Pastor Doug creased his eyes and mumbled, "God has a plan..."

You kind of need to shake the world up, like a gigantic snow globe...turn it upside down, then right side up...only then does it look as it should...I'm ready to be righted—and I don't know about you, but I'm getting awfully dizzy with all of this shaking going on.

I miss her. Today more than all the others, obviously. She would have turned 49 years old...Aunt Debbie would have made her favorite birthday treat...a cherry chip cake with lots of extra frosting. We would have belted the birthday song and rounded it out with, "...and maaaany mooooore!" as she extinguished the charitable truncation of candles adorning the frosting-heavy monstrosity. We wished her the same last year, and it didn't so much work...but if Cancer can be vanquished by sheer determination and will, hers would have been. I think just about any one of us would have gladly taken her place, standing there at Death's threshold...she was just that kind of woman.

I feel as though I'm living on a treadmill of dejà vu. Everything seems to be a replay of an event that's already happened, every feeling of worthlessness and uselessness renewing their plug for airtime. I have my surgical follow up this Friday, and I'm terrified a horned demon is going to jump from a cabinet and tell me that I have Cancer after all. Forgive me for not accepting good news as the final word...we had lots of good news with Mom.

For instance, the Fall of 2003 when they removed 17 tumors from her body and the surgeon (and, incidentally, by design, my surgeon), told us she was Cancer free that day in the waiting room. I remember going to the chapel and sobbing my thanks to God. We thought remission was possible in those days...I even remember Debbie buying Mom a Cancer Sucks tee...Chris McHugh had passed away just a few months earlier, and she was a local hero...still is, really. I remember Mom's reaction in opening the garment box, just days before her surgery...her mouth offered a parody of a smile as she said, "I don't plan on having Cancer much longer."

See, this is all before they dropped the bomb: "Liela, you will never be Cancer free...but you have a solid 15 years left." And two years later...well, you know the rest. And one just cannot forget the seeming wonderful news at the end of last December...that her tumors ceased in their growth. The Cancer was going away? Awesome!

A month later, we greeted friends and family at her memorial service.

Last year on the fourteenth, I remember attending church and then coming home to a birthday celebration to rival the return of Caesar to his beloved Rome. We were all so happy, soaking in the blessing of just a little more time...always just a little more time. I miss her hugs and her voice...I miss her soft skin and her sparkling smile...I miss her silliness and her seriousness both. I miss her ears, always open and happy to let me philosophize...and I miss the best parent, nurturer, and friend anybody could ever know. Happy Birthday, Momma...keep looking out for me, will you? I still need you.

So after a lot of back-and-forth discussion between my physician and my physicians' assistant regarding the ct scan results, I was referred to my mother's surgeon, and had a consultation appointment set for Tuesday-last...the first of August, the month of both our birthdays. By Tuesday, I was in so much pain, the percocets weren't even touching it...and I woke that morning with a chapped face and a tear-dampened pillow.

Nick took the morning off from work to deliver me to my 10-AM consultation. Sitting had become impossible by that point, and my tush was so bruised, swollen, and fevered over my tailbone, or where the tailbone is supposed to be. Nick had taken to driving a passenger sprawled on her belly on a reclined seat.

So almost as soon as Dr. Weber sees me, she tells me that she's going to admit me to the hospital...if nothing else for pain control. The surreal moment was walking into the examination room before she arrived there, and seeing my mother's oncologist with a team of other doctors studying my x-rays...I gather they were mine from the bits of conversation Nick overheard.

That's pretty much my last really vivid memory from last week. I remember the IV drugs not working...not the morphine, not the next step higher with the clickie-pain dispenser thing, and I vaguely remember being told that I had an operating room date at 8:30 the next morning.

So a week of very poor hygiene and a red blanket of pain is what I remember...that, and a lot of visits from Nick. When I left on Friday, I learned that I had a major infection that's probably been building for awhile...in fact, they drained a liter and a half (!) of fluid from my butt, and I have a wound that requires gauze packing and unpacking two times every day...for which Nick has offered his services. I'm so grateful.

Oh, and I truly do not have a tailbone. I just didn't grow the thing...as Nick says, I'm just higher on the evolutionary ladder, seeing as humans don't so much need tails and therefore, the corresponding bones. When Sarah and Jason visited, Jason coupled that with the fact that I only have one wisdom tooth trying to muck up my mouth, and we humans don't really need those either. I find it all very funny as one of my last days at work, we were joking that me and my fellow short co-worker both could raise one eyebrow in quizzical pose. It was hypothesized that we were the next wave of evolution—small with muscular eyebrows.

The disturbing part, obviously, is I've always felt a bump where my tailbone should have been...I've invited many over the past years to feel my "tailbone" because it just didn't feel right. It hurt me often, and I am very ginger with it. Disturbing yet, is that there was no smoking gun to be found in the operating room. What caused the infection is unknown, meaning it could happen again. So, I'm to heal from this leg of the journey and then we do more scans, more tests, and consider surgery to look for the monster living in my body. The sample they sent off came back benign by way of Cancer...so I'm going to consider myself Cancer-free for now, and hope that the ugly inside of me can be vanquished before it can strike again.

They say I have to be off from work for a month-plus...I'm hoping it will be shorter than that...I'm going to go crazy otherwise, and I want to be a responsible, employed, card-carrying member of adulthood. For now, I'll end here, I just wanted to give you an update. I'm doing much better, and Nick is the best caregiver I could have asked for...

...Even so, I'm heavy-hearted with thoughts of my mother. Thoughts of being sick as a youngster...her constructing a makeshift bed on the sun-drenched couch and making me a Bisquick pancake, cutting it in squares because I prefer my Bisquick pancakes plain, and eaten as finger food...which few knew but her. I remember her resting cool, damp cloths over my forehead and smoothing the hair from my brow. I remember her making fresh-squeezed, pulpy orange juice for me because she knew how much I loved an orange juice that nearly required teeth to consume. Most of all, I remember feeling rotten, but hearing her voice and knowing all would be ok.