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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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Miracles & Biopsy Results

I woke up this morning feeling like today – day six — was a good day for some good results. A miraculous proclamation from the all-powerful. And as I sat on my screened porch with my coffee and prayers, God sent me a little sprig of positivity.

I heard the jangling of a little bell on the wind chimes hanging out by the pool. I turned my head, confused. There was no wind and the chimes were hanging still. But as I squinted, I saw the flash of feathers and heard a second bell jingle.

Now these chimes are comprised of a large tin star with long strands of beads and bells hanging off four of its five points. And there, at the bottom bell of the longest strand, I saw a tiny house sparrow pinching and pulling the bell with her beak. 

Now that’s not something you see every day, I thought.

And as I watched, she flew to a pot of geraniums and cocked her head at me. See what I just did there?  she seemed to intone. See what unexpected things I can do?

I saw. I heard. And I believed in the sign — the augury, if you will (an Ancient Roman practice of divination through birds). In other words, in little winged messages from God.

And lo and behold, this afternoon, the message officially arrived in Bethany’s patient portal: her biopsy results are NEGATIVE. Her tumor is BENIGN. 

Now it’s not lost on me that traditionally, a bell is rung when a cancer milestone is reached, and what a milestone Bethany just reached. Her cancer has NOT metastasized. She remains CANCER FREE after a terrifying scare.

There’s a quote attributed to St. Augustine that says: “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” 

Well, I would’ve said a tiny bird playing with a wind chime and watching to make sure I saw it is completely contrary to nature. But now, I know that’s not the case. 

Am I a believer in miracles? Absolutely. We just need to keep our eyes and ears open.

Today, I saw and heard two.

 

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Biopsy-Day Timeline Journal Entry

10:00 AM

I’ve avoided writing about Boop and what’s on her agenda this morning, instead scouring the internet for Gluggle Jugs to order and going on Christmas ornament hunts for everyone’s Thanksgiving boxes, but now, I’m going to bite the biopsy, as it were and talk about the Big Scary Bubble on the CT scan that floats in our collective peripheral vision. 

It’s been a strange experience – and we aren’t done yet— though I pray we’re close to shutting the door on this stage 4 scare.  I feel like it’s a Winnie-the-Pooh, “I’m just a little black rain cloud” scenario for us, threatening to ruin the honey sweetness of our lives,

And today, that threat needs tending to. Today, one of Caitlin’s most-trusted colleagues will go in and snag some samples to send to pathology. So, Winnie-the-Pooh and his fuzzy, destructive paw can go fuck himself. 

…

11:34 AM

Caitlin just received word that the IR specialist, was able to pierce the tumor and withdraw a good sample to send up for rapid analysis in Miami’s on-site pathology lab. She says it’s a solid mass – which means the blip on the radar may be a legitimate threat — but there’s always a chance it’s benign. I pray the biopsy needle punctures this little black raincloud, removes its teeth and claws.

(About this ridiculous Pooh metaphor: You know how horror films use the most innocent, tinkling nursery rhymes and bright, colorful party scenes in blurry slo-mo just before introducing the killer? That’s the scene I keep imagining. I want the calliope music to stop. The hovering raincloud with ill-intent to vanish. For us to return to our enchanted place.)

…

2:17 PM

Results have come back with no malignant cells detected. A small victory, as the rapid results can give us an idea of what we’re dealing with, but far from an official answer. Still, there’s a possibility that the sample wasn’t actual tumor tissue, but lung tissue surrounding it. So, they collected seven more samples before waking Boop up to send to an off-site lab for official results. That’ll take five to ten days. So, the waiting game continues…  

But we feel cautiously optimistic.  Boop herself says she doesn’t want to think she’s in the clear yet — only to be crushed in another week — and I totally get it. So we wait on the experts to tell us the results. 

Because, as Pooh so cleverly says:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.” (A.A. Milne)

So we wait and we pray to God, the biggest expert of all, for “Un-Thingish” results from this Thing occupying our hearts and minds. And we would very much appreciate any and all of you who feel so led to please pray for the same.

PS: Pooh never means any harm and I believe this blip doesn’t, as well. That’s what I have to believe.

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Terrifying Atypical Images on my Baby Girl’s CT Scan

I don’t know if I’m reacting the way a typical mother should. I don’t know what the “typical mother” should react like, feel like, process like.  I’m not paralyzed in place. I’m not gnashing my teeth, nor wailing like a banshee. I’m not ready to rip heads off strangers, or the roses in my back yard… or God.

I mean, that would be pretty typical, right? Blasphemous, yes, but typical — to be angry at God, right? And everyone else out there walking around perfectly healthy in His perfect image?  

Instead, I’m still going through the motions of my normal life… considering all the things I need to do for the day, the places and practices where the boys need to be, what I should make for dinner… even proceeding with this two-week trip to the UK. Surely that one is blasphemy, right? That’s definitely not how I should be acting is it? That’s not typical…

But then, what is typical anyway? 

Because my daughter surely isn’t the typical patient for this disease. This clear cell renal carcinoma that appears to have spread to her liver. As in Stage 4.

That diagnosis is typical of an older person… and a male. Bethany is neither old nor a man. She is a thirty-five-years-young mother of three, who was 33 when she first learned she had a tumor on her right kidney. Thirty-three when she had her partial nephrectomy. If they’d taken her whole kidney, would it have made a difference? Is that typically what’s done? 

No, none of this feels typical. So maybe my reactions don’t need to be either?  

Besides, we still don’t know for sure that’s what we’re dealing with. Although our family’s margin for error is much slimmer than for most. A typical patient’s family would only know that an MRI has been recommended to supply additional detailed imaging at this stage. (This stage. The irony of that phrase is not lost on me.) But we have our own staff of surgical oncologists as kith and kin. 

So while a typical patient’s family would have only been notified of the suspicious lesions on the CT scan, our patient’s surgical oncologist sister immediately asks for a cd of the scan, watches it remotely, knows what she sees, shows the images to her most-trusted radiologist and fellow oncology colleagues, along with every other physician friend she trusts and loves from all over the United States, (because it’s her sister, after all, and she really, really wants to have been wrong),  and they all agree the lesions are characteristic of metastasis from renal cell… so much so that the sister-surgical-oncologist  immediately has her sister’s treatment moved to the University of Miami where she practices and where her surg/onc partner is installed as caregiver, who then immediately orders a chest CT to make sure there are no additional mets in the lungs, along with a referral to an interventional radiologist for an immediate biopsy, as well as a timeline for immunotherapy and eventual (hopeful) liver resection.

No, a typical patient’s family doesn’t have all these experts and referrals and scans and biopsies and treatments fast-tracked to near hyper-speed. Most patients don’t have that privilege.

I understand how privileged we are. I am grateful. So grateful. 

But I’m also here to say it doesn’t feel like privilege. It feels like awfully bad fortune. My daughter faces a terrifying fight. And while the storm howls all around us, I’m doing my best to focus on the tasks at hand. The rehearsals and practices, the dinners and laundry, flights and itineraries. Doing my best to move forward. 

Because there is a slight, oh-so-slight chance, that the spots are perfusion abnormalities. That the contrast pooled. Or that they are solid, but not malignant: hepatic adenoma, hemangioma, or follicular nodular hyperplasia… all benign.

And even though 10 out of 10 experts believe that’s most likely not the case, we are praying for and believing in a miracle.

Most patients and their mothers would do the same. At least on that, I’m pretty certain we’re typical.

Miracles aren’t typical. That’s the nature of miracles. If they were, they wouldn’t be miracles. They would be ordinary occurences. As in, typical. But my daughter, her diagnosis, the whole situation, isn’t typical.

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i carry her heart in my heart

I carry all their hearts in my heart. I’ve been doing it since they first turned lines on a stick pink, blew celebration bubbles in my blood test with their energy and light. So much energy. So much light. All four of them. They pop and sizzle like neon in my life. Beautiful and bold. They keep my heart beating with joy and pride.

And so when they suffer, I suffer.  When they fizzle, things go dark in my core. In the root of the root and the bud of the bud. And so, when one of them was diagnosed with cancer, it took my breath away, I couldn’t speak, could barely function. Just clutched her tight inside my chest and searched for ways to navigate this new dark. Just fumbling through it all with no words.

I wanted to write about it. It’s how I process and find ways to proceed. But I couldn’t. There in my heart in the darkness, the letters I needed to construct words to make sense of it all were too slippery with tears and fears. When I tried to latch onto them, they disintegrated into mush. 

I felt her fear and I felt my own. I felt her bravery struggling inside my own quaking soul. I felt her intense energy, hobbled and hidden, while pain pulsed in its place. And I was helpless in the midst of it all.

It’s been a month now, and she’s doing better and gaining her strength and my words are slowly sprouting, letter by letter, out of the storm drain where they collected during it all. But it’s taking me far longer to assemble them. It’s like that old game of pick-up-sticks (similar to jenga) – pluck out one to use without dislodging another, otherwise everything I want to say will crumble into yet another useless pile. 

But I’ve managed to scrounge up enough to tell a cryptic version of what it was like and how she’s doing now – and she’s doing so very, very well. Her cancer was excised, the margins all clear. And while she’s got scores of seasonal scans headed her way this first year, her prognosis is solid – better than solid, it’s as bright as her neon spirit. 

And I still can’t explain what that bright light returning does inside a mother’s heart. I wish I could. I can only say there’s no pain like heartache. And no heartache like a child’s ache. And no better feeling than when it all goes right, and your baby’s back to shining bright – her neon smile shining like a night in Nashville, spunky and spirited as ever.

Thank heavens for miracles and thank heavens for these four beautiful, brilliant, beating chambers of my heart.

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The C Word

They come in threes, they say. Bad things come in threes. And sure

enough, bad tidings rode in on their serrated fonts in swirling

impatient portals: an unholy trinity of cyst, malignancy and mass.

One slung sideways, like a fanny pack across a kidney sack, a second,

mortared to wind pipe, spewing ash into places unknown, a third sucking

marrow from mammary glands like a motherfucker. Unsanctified settlers,

all. Mother of all that is Holy, who let in the false prophet, the devil, the

beast to cast rings around x-rays and pockets full of poison, ashen shadows

on MRI scans? All that rot and stink and bile planted like rancid Easter eggs,

tangled spiders’ nests, like hissing snakes in sacred sanctuaries… Such blatant

blasphemy. Such sick sacrilege. But then, while bad things come in threes, so

too, do good. And we believe in the Good — that Triumvirate of Truth: Faith

and Hope and Love. And the greatest of these is Love. Love lends strength and

courage to fight. When we harness for God the energies of love, then love will

help conquer all. Together, we’ll banish the bad for Good.     Even the dirty, rotten C word.

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A Wish is a Prayer Your Soul Makes

I love wishes. I’m a big believer. They are my favorite form of prayer — tiny little heart’s desires in a single sentence — sent out into the universe. They’re like a mantra. I wish the same one over and over until it is granted. And it very nearly always is.

And the universe gives so many occasions to speak our dreams and desires: on birthday candles and shooting stars, on eyelashes lost and pennies found, on coins in fountains, and wishbones in hand. They ride dandelion fluff and ladybug wings.

I learned their power and value way back when, on Sunday nights in front of the television while watching “The Wonderful World of Disney.” Tinkerbell would wave her wand and Cinderella’s castle would erupt in festive fireworks and Disney’s tinkling instrumental theme song would whisper the power of wishes… Jiminy Cricket’s “When You Wish Upon a Star,” Snow White’s “I’m Wishing,” and Cinderella’s “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.”

I was indoctrinated at an early age. And then my wishes merged with the evangelical movement of my childhood, and I latched onto the promise of “ask and ye shall receive,” “seek and ye shall find.” And I found myself a believer.

And I decided, if a dream is a wish your heart makes, then a wish is a prayer your soul makes…

And ever since, I’ve sent so many wishes out into the universe – a series of one-sentence mantras repeated until they come true.

And they usually do.

Mike and I came true. And so did the boys. And my girls. And their blessings. So many blessings. So many wonderful wishes have come, and are coming, true.

Yes, my track record is solid… but not undefeated.

There have been wishes I’ve repeated like mantras for months. For years. And they never seem to materialize.

Sometimes I think wishes are only granted for the Disney-type-desires. The tiara and taffeta kinds of wishes, the happily-ever-after, against-all-odds-imprisonment-and-sorcery kinds of dreams. Things that end in freedom and love. In new lives and sweet loves and new babies and fresh starts.

But the ones reserved for sickness… or, more specifically, cancer… those seem not to take as well. Those seem not to get answered. And I don’t really understand why.

Cancer sucks. That’s the meme; that’s the hashtag; that’s the absolute truth.

It sucks.

And its cells keep stubbornly replicating harder and faster than my wishes on lashes and ladybugs can fly. And it sucks the joy and the freedom and the energy out of my friends.

Cancer is an angry, aggressive, harsh vacuum. A black hole that targets the gentlest and most generous amongst us. And so very often in my life, it’s targeted women. Women who have nurtured and loved and saved and sacrificed. Grandmothers, mothers, teachers, and friends. My grandmother, my best friend’s mother, my two dear teacher friends. They’ve all battled or are battling cancer.

And my wishes all seem to fall flat. And make me question my faith.

Even my more traditional prayers –long and devout and completely dedicated to destroying the wide, gaping mouth-of-a-black-hole-on-Satan’s-backside that IS cancer — seem not to have the stamina to soar and succeed against this vile foe.

But there’s got to be a way to defeat it. There just has to be.

My physician daughter is currently doing cancer research. She is AIKA-deep in clinical trials and focus groups and data pulls and cross-discipline conferences. She is a part of an army of physicians all over the world who are currently spelunking Satan’s arsehole, searching for ways to destroy its ability to suck.

And I know this war has been waged for decades. But I know that we’ve got to be getting closer. We just have to be.

And then I think about all those wishes I’ve made. All the ones that HAVE come true. They’ve been positive ones. Focused on love and goals and abilities. They haven’t had any negative words, no Defeat or Destroy or Kill words. They house words like Help and Grow and Love and Learn.

And my evangelical childhood taught me that God helps those who help themselves.  And mankind is working hard to help themselves, my daughter included amongst them. We just need a little more time. Just a little more time to deactivate Satan’s anus, to ratchet down his rectum, to strip mine his sigmoid. To render his sphincter suction-less. The doctors are on this.

So I will refocus my prayers to positivity and light. If a dream is a wish your heart makes, and a wish is a prayer your soul makes, then I wish for Happily-Ever-Afters. No more “Defeat cancer” and “Destroy cancer.” Leave that to the doctors. Now my dandelion mantras and pennies-found prayers will be: “Help us find the way and the truth and the light. Help us find the cure.”

Over and over. And over. Amen.

 

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