When the Smoke Clears

“My surgeon, he’s good, but… NO sense of humor,” mom told me as we talked on the phone. She had already shocked me last week. It was effective, blood chilling.

A little over a week ago mom’s back broke. She was complaining of lower back pain. She became insistent to her doctor that it wasn’t a pulled muscle. Indeed it wasn’t. She had a fractured spine.

She had been in the hospital for 5 days. She didn’t let me know about it until right before she was scheduled for surgery. She didn’t say it, but I know why. I’ve pulled the same crap with her when I’ve been severely medically compromised, not wanting her to worry, not wanting to interfere with her life to come sit around doing basically nothing for days on end. I’m in school. She didn’t want me to miss it, knowing had I known, I would have taken emergency leave and hopped a plane as fast as possible.

Well played, matron.

But my family, tiny as it is, has a constant need for humor.

“What did you do?” I asked, more as an admonishment than a question.

“I just asked that since I was going to be out anyway, would he mind maybe doing a little facelift. At least a little eye-tuck. Nothing. He didn’t even react.”

“Can you walk?”

“Yeah, I can walk,” she said. “They were worried. My sister was driving me home from the MRI and they called back and said to turn around, not to move, not to get out of the car, but go straight to the emergency room where they were expecting me. Since then, they haven’t really wanted me to walk.”

The surgery went well. She’s uncomfortable, but healing. She’s back at her home. Her friends are coming to visit, which she’s billing not so much as them helping her and driving her to appointments, but as a chance for them to get together after all these years AND get to stay at a beautiful condo on the ocean. She’s a salesperson.

Mom works out. She goes to the gym. She uses weights. Real weights. Pumps iron. She doesn’t just go for a walk, she jogs, occasionally runs now that she has the pacemaker in. The impact must have taken some toll, but only if there were something else underlying.

And there is.

She starts Chemotherapy this week.

It’s all treatable. It’s not curable.

I, too, have an old friend I needed to lean on. She and I were raised together. When we were babies, our parents used to get together for cocktails and hanging out. They’d stick she and I in a tub together and hoped we wouldn’t drown. We’ve stayed close over the years, even when we didn’t stay in touch. We’ve fought. We’ve been there in the middle of the night when something went horribly badly. She’s come to live with my mom and I before. She’s so beautiful. Always has been. Always will be. Her husband, who has only met me once, though we have talked, understands about us. Her sick sense of humor was what I needed.

I told her the news. Her reaction: “I’m so sorry. Actually, not entirely surprised. I mean, COME ON! I’ve known her all my life, too. I know how she can be when she wants something, but to come down with cancer just to try to keep you, her only son, from being deployed! What a manipulative bitch!”

We laughed so hard through the hurt. But God does bring people together for a reason. My friend, after many years, eventually became a nurse. However, she quit that when her daughter was born and has been a full-time mother, not easy especially during her own husband’s deployments. However, it just so happens that she was looking to get back into nursing. It just so happens she now lives in the area where one of the best cancer clinics is. It just so happens she was putting together her resume to apply for a position in that clinic, specifically in the branch of the clinic where mom will receive additional treatment in a few months.

“Tell her to get her butt on over here.”

“That’s so good of you,” I said.

“Well, she’s done an awful lot for me. I’ve got a huge house. Plenty of room, but this is more of her doing stuff for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t been a nurse for a while, so they might be a little skeptical, but if I go with her to the clinic, they’ll get used to seeing me and then they’ll fall for your mom, and she’ll put in a word about me being a nurse and then I won’t even have to apply. They’ll beg me. Tell her I’ll get a 2 for 1 deal on facelifts and we’ll go get ours together as soon as her treatment is done.”

“And my mom is manipulative?”

“Whatever works. I love you so much.”

She didn’t need to say it, but it was good to hear.

So in the meantime I talk with mom when I can. I think she’s getting a little tired of the daily calls, but too bad. I can rarely have my cell phone on me and with time differences, I’ll take what I can get.

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