October 10, continued
Jerry said that when Sue, the hospice nurse, came to the house, Mother was just mean to her. “What do you want now?!” she demanded.
When Mother had first been diagnosed with uterine cancer—that was in November of 2008—the oncologist had told us that her cancer was the meanest, deadliest kind. He gave her no more than four to six months to live. She refused to have chemo because she had seen what I went through with it, and the doctor said her heart was not strong enough for surgery. The only treatment left was radiation.
Mother had two sets of radiation treatment in January, and never took the last one available to her. The radiologist said that would give her from nine months to two years—two years being January 2011-- but Dr. McMeekin told us it was such a fast-growing cancer, not to expect too much. He suggested we get Mother on hospice.
One day, not long after her last radiation treatment, Mother said she lay down in bed to go to sleep. Suddenly her body was lifted up, floating. Below her, there were all these kind faces with arms reaching up toward her. She said she felt pure love--like she was back at New Hope Baptist, but it wasn’t the people she knew there. All of a sudden her body started tingling all over, and she was filled with an overwhelming sense of peace. She believed that was God healing her.
Mother was still living in independent living, still working in her flower garden, still cooking most of her own meals, riding the bus to church every Sunday, going to her exercise class at the Center every day. She was in no pain at all. She did NOT want a hospice nurse, did not feel she needed a hospice nurse, and took it out on Sue. Poor Sue. Every single time she came, Mother told her, sometimes sweetly, sometimes rudely, that she just didn’t think she needed hospice, that she thought she was healed.
Every time we went back for a check-up with the oncologist, he was amazed at how well she was doing.
“Look, I thought I was supposed to be dead by now,” she would tell him. She told him the story of her “healing” every time she saw him. She wanted another CT scan to prove it to him. He said, “Well, if you’re healed, then you don’t need another CT scan, do you?”
She was kind of embarrassed that she’d told everyone she was dying when she felt fine. “I just don’t know what to say to people?” she wanted to know.
He told her, “You just tell them that I said you’re a walking miracle.”
Finally, after hearing her say for the fifth time that she didn’t think she needed hospice, he agreed to let her tell Sue she could quit coming. He shook his head in amazement at her strength of will.
Now, Mother’s interpretation of his words was that she was healed, and she told everyone at the Baptist Village, everyone at her church, everyone she knew that God had cured her of this horrible cancer. She was not in any pain at all, never had been, and so. That was that.
Sometimes, as I was driving her to her doctor’s appointments, she would accuse me, “You don’t think I’m healed, do you?”
“I don’t know. We don’t have any proof either way.” She would smirk at my lack of faith. I told her, “Now if there is anyone who has a direct line to Jesus, it’s you, so I wouldn’t say you aren’t healed. I just know that Dr. McMeeken said you had the most virulent kind of uterine cancer there is.”
When her congestive heart failure flared up in May, Dr. McMeekin, her oncologist, released her, thinking the heart failure was so serious that it would kill her before the cancer did.
In early May that her breathing had become so labored that I thought she was going to die. Her primary care physician, Dr. McCoy, was worried because her legs were so swollen she couldn’t even get her shoes on. He put her on oxygen, hoping that would take care of it.
As her condition worsened, he got Mother an appointment with a heart specialist and told her she needed to get back on hospice care. We requested Sue, the same nurse, since she knew her so well already.
We had to wait three weeks for our appointment with Dr. Williams at the Oklahoma Heart Hospital. Several times during that period I thought she was close to death. She didn’t have enough energy to walk to the dining room, had to have her meals delivered to her. I would watch her strain to put a bite of food in her mouth. I started doing her laundry for her, something she had never allowed me to do before.
We knew she was really sick when she didn’t want to come to Chloe’s birthday party June 5. To miss a family gathering for any reason was unheard of for Dorothy. The nurse made arrangements to move her to the downstairs apartment closest to the nurse’s station, and we moved her at the end of June.
Really, I should have just taken her to the emergency room. I would have if I’d known how easily they could have helped her.
As soon as Dr. Williams saw her, he put her in the hospital immediately. He put her on Lasix to drain all the excess fluid. The swelling in her legs went down, but when her right lung was still gurgling after three days, he called in a pulmonologist, Dr. Wood, who tapped her lung. Dr. Wood removed over a liter of fluid, and the next day, the 4th of July, she was well enough to go home.
She was like a new person when she could breathe again, but the lab results showed that the fluid in her lungs was full of cancer cells, not lung cancer but uterine cancer. Now she was embarrassed for people to know that she hadn’t been healed after all.
Dr. Wood told us her lungs would refill, and that we could bring her to the emergency room any time it happened. It’s a little more complicated than it sounds because she has to go off her Coumadin, a blood thinner for her congestive heart failure, for three days before he can tap her lungs. With the help of Michelle, the nurse at the Baptist Village, and Sue, the Hospice nurse, we knew when it was time to take her back. She had her lungs tapped again in the doctor’s office on August 23, not so much fluid this time as the first.
She was feeling pretty good. One day, when I was having lunch with her at the Village, she asked me in front of all her friends, “Well, aren’t you ever going to invite me over to your house to eat again?” I was taken back. She had shown no interest in leaving the place for the last two months. “Sure, we’ll have you over tomorrow,” I said. “Well, really, I just want some fried okra,” she said.
Then, on September 7, she had her stroke.
Since she’s been at our house, her congestive heart failure has much improved. Her legs haven’t swollen at all, and Sue says her lungs sound good.
Today, though, she was just mad at Sue all over again. Sue said she hadn’t seen that side of her in a long time. Somewhere back there in her mind, I guess she remembered this was the lady that symbolized Death to her.
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