My mother was diagnosed in November with liver cancer. Her surgery was in New York, at Sloan-Kettering, about two weeks prior to the New Year. She didn’t want me to bother to fly in. There wasn’t the room, she said, and anyway, she’d be fine. After a too brief hospital stay, she was sent home, still weak, barely able to board the plane. Dizzy, nauseated and dehydrated, she went back into the hospital on January 2.
I drove up from Austin on January 3rd. I didn’t have time to pack a proper bag, and just grabbed my most recent washed clothes, still in the laundry basket. The weather was in the mid-60s; I didn’t even think to take a coat.
That evening in her room, I immediately felt something more serious was wrong. This was supposed to be the best hospital in town, and her primary care doctor was one of the most prominent oncologists in the country. In all my reading, post-liver surgery hospital stays were supposed to average about ten days. Here it was almost three weeks later, and she was only getting worse. And the staff didn’t seem particularly rushed to find out why.
It’s a sad commentary on our health system that although she wasn’t able to sit up, much less keep anything down, the nurses kept coming in at the appointed hour with trays of horrid hospital food. They would come back later, ask if she’d eaten anything, then take it all away again. There were countless shapes and sizes of nurses, most of whom didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what the others were doing. They had her on an IV which gave her a constant drip of something that was supposed to keep her hydrated. They gave her anti-nausea drugs. Some would make her feel worse. At first, they also injected morphine. They tried two other narcotics because she kept complaining of head pain. It was like they were doing experiments on her. I kept trying to get the nurses to explain why they were giving her this and that, and their only response was that it was on her chart. This went on for a week until someone got the bright idea to do a CAT scan of her head, which they followed up with a MRI. They found a lemon sized tumor there at the base of her brain.
The doctors would never tell us what we should do — they would lay out options in front of us like playing cards and ask us to pick one. I suppose this relieved them of responsibility when something went wrong. They gave us percentages like game odds that were pulled from the air, “There’s an 80 percent probability she’ll make it through the surgery just fine.” Then later they could say, “Well, we told them there was a chance she wouldn’t make it.” Before any procedure, they had us sign papers which noted, “Medicine is an art and not a science. There are no warranties or guarantees.”
It was a tragedy of errors. I would suggest anyone who might have to go through it think twice before going under the knife.
Being here with my family has been theraupetic. It’s also been a time of introspection and thinking about the “big questions” of life. In recent years my mother and I didn’t have what might be considered an ideal relationship. She was difficult to please and often more ready with a criticism than compliment. But she did so because she had high expectations and didn’t know how to articulate her desires and hopes for me. We went through periods in which we wouldn’t talk for a while. Her own mother died 22 years ago — coincidentally, when my mother was the same age as I am. They too had a strained relationship, in large part because my grandmother and grandfather were absentee parents. My uncle, aunt and mother all had to look after each other from a young age. It sounds very nineteenth century, but they were often left alone at home to fend for themselves. My aunt today talks about how she didn’t have parents growing up. You have to remember this is post-war Soviet Union, and Dr. Spock hadn’t quite made an impression there.
In my armchair psychologist’s view, each of the siblings were left with some deficits of understanding. The oldest, my uncle Aaron, who moved to Germany, is brilliant but unable to deal with matters of the heart at all. He can’t express how he feels and is embarrassed if anyone sees him getting emotional. When we brought him from the airport and he saw my mother in the ICU, he just stood by her bed, then went into the hall and paced.
My mother overcompensated, she would get over-emotional and upset, particularly with my sister. But she would internalize the stress and just pretend that everything was fine. She didn’t like people to think that she was ever in distress. When I wanted to come to New York for her surgery, she told me that there wasn’t enough room. In that way, I think I’m like her — I don’t like others to worry about me. But at the same time, I don’t get stressed like she did. She always worried about the future. To me, the future is like an open field — you can cut your own path through it, but no one’s been there before, so no one can tell you where it leads. The importance is that you pick the path with care; you move forward and not dwell on which direction you could have gone.
My aunt Sola is the adventurous type. She and I were both named for my great-grandfather Solomon. She was the baby of the family and looked like a little doll, so all the love was heaped on her. She was five years younger than my mother, and got dragged around all over Riga. She and her husband left the country first, while pregnant, to come to Israel. Sola started and managed her own companies. Over the years, she’s had her own troubles. Now, at 48, she looks older and more like my mother than I could have imagined. When upset, she lets you know.
So we’ve all been here and commiserated with each other in our grief. My sister flew out already — she has children to take care of. My cousin Leo went back to Toronto last night. My uncle Aaron, his father, left today for Frankfort. I’ll be here longer to say Kaddish and chose the headstone. And then, I’ll pick another path through the field.