Monday – Apples and Oranges

[ninanevermore]

I handled the announcement well. We all did. No one got too emotional, no one panicked, and no one had to be consoled. Not me, and not my oldest or my youngest brother, either. We were told to keep quiet for now, because my middle brother – who is estranged from us siblings but no longer from our father – had not been told that our father has cancer.

It took me a full 24 hours to fall apart, right in the middle of congratulating myself on how well I was handling the news. I hate it when that happens.

”It’s not a bad cancer,” my father said, “Well, I guess there aren’t any good cancers, but as far as they go this isn’t a bad one. It has a 90% survival rate, if you can believe what they tell you.”

“With your dad’s health, they don't want to do surgery,” my step-mother chimed in, “So he’s going to start radiation therapy.” She went on to explain about how they inject radioactive “seeds” into the prostrate and let them do their thing. The cancer is late stage 1 or early stage 2, so they caught it at the right time. I was thinking about my father’s uncle Bob, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in his mid 80’s and who died of general old age at the age of 98. I figured my dad is at least as tough as his uncle Bob.

We’ll just watch and see how it goes, I told myself. What happens will happen, and getting all worked up isn’t going to help anything. The prognosis is good. But then this logical line of thought ran into some old emotional baggage. The impact caused the latch on my baggage to pop open, and I found myself crying behind the wheel of my steering wheel on the way back from the grocery store yesterday evening. I still can’t figure out if the tears were for my father, or for my mother.

This ain’t my first rodeo, as they say here in Texas. It’s not the first matter-of-fact-but-upbeat announcement that one of my parents has cancer that I’ve heard. I was 12 years old the first time I heard this speech, when it was about my mother. It was made at the dinner table and we kids were told not to worry and not to talk about it outside of the family because it was a private matter. But that was a far more aggressive form of cancer, and treatments were far less advanced in 1982. The odds are that my father will die of something other than the cancer. No one ever discussed my mother’s prognosis with me, but I suspect it was never very good. It simply never occurred to either of my parents at the time that there was anything on the planet tougher than my mother, so they didn’t worry about her prognosis that much because she was going to beat it. I wish they had been right.

They’re apples and oranges, my mom’s cancer and my dad’s cancer: they aren’t at all alike. I know that. After all, I am a stoic, reasonable woman. Even if the treatment aggravates my father's other underlying health issues (he has pulmonary fibrosis after his bout of pneumonia last year and still has to sleep with an oxygen mask), I'll probably still have him around for a bit longer yet. All I have to do is find a way to reassure that 12 year old girl inside of me that, really, things are completely different this time around. She doesn’t seem to want to listen, though. You know how kids are.


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Comments

[neanahe.livejournal.com]

Thank you!