The Patient Person for April 27, 2007

• By SARAH ANDERSON
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Apr 27, 2007

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I am sleeping upstairs, dreaming fitfully of helping Mom to the bathroom. The dream feels real, her meager weight heavy across my shoulders, her grip frightened and firm on my arm.

Then a wail climbs the stairs, a long, mournful, “No! No! No!” The pitch, the tone, the volume all are so surreal and unexpected that I wonder if I’m still asleep. I rush down the stairs in the darkness.

It’s 4:45, and Dad is supporting Mom, who has gotten up to use the bathroom. She stands, stooped, holding tight to the chair where Dad had been sitting, apparently unable to muster the strength for the short journey back to her bed.

Her strength is focused on her cries. She calls out for her mother in a heart-wrenching, helpless voice, a young child’s voice, only more powerful.

Dad asks me to call for a hospice nurse. As I describe the situation to the nurse on call, Mom lets out another long, loud cry that the nurse can hear on her end of the line. The nurse promises she’ll be here as soon as she can.

I return to the room to find Mom sitting in the doorway, Dad holding her up. She yells for her nurse, yells for a housekeeper, just yells.

After a night of trying to decipher Mom’s whispered questions and requests, I’m struck by the volume in her cries. I know something of the energy it takes for her to summon her voice, and I worry she’s depleting whatever thin reserves she may have.

She grabs at the bag that drains her kidney and tries to tear it from her body. Dad holds her arm and finally stills her fighting. Mom holds the doorknob with a grip that prevents us from moving her. Neither Dad nor I can loosen her grip on the doorknob or the kidney bag without hurting her.

Her deep, sorrowful cries continue, and there’s little Dad or I can do to comfort her. I smooth her hair and stroke her cheek. Dad holds her hand and repeats softly that he loves her. She doesn’t seem to recognize us.

Then we see an emotion that’s new in Mom’s battle with colon cancer. Amidst her cries, she begins talking about herself in the third person, yelling, “She’s only 52! She’s too young!”

Mom is 53. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year-and-a-half ago.

The sentiment that’s she’s too young to be taken by this disease isn’t lost on either me or Dad. It’s the way we both feel when we think about the diagnosis. She’s being robbed — we’re being robbed.

Rarely do any of us dwell on that injustice or give voice to it. In her columns, Mom has used it to show how indiscriminate cancer can be and how important that makes it to listen to our bodies. And all of us try to see past the anger we may feel at a life cut short to instead treasure a life well lived.