One Small Request...

I was in the middle of mixing up a meatloaf last week when my sister Kathy called from the Union Street Pub in Old Town, Alexandria. She called to see how I was doing and to catch me up on all the things going on with my Mother's cancer treatment. I learned that my mother's initial chemotherapy didn't work. The radiation part of it seemed to work fine, but the actual chemotherapy itself, the chemical part of it, after much deliberation by many doctors far more knowledgeable in that area than myself, turned out to have had nearly no effect on her cancer. What's worse, in doing nothing, it allowed 5 more growths to form in her brain and a golf ball sized lump to grow on her lower neck, right where the neck and the shoulder meet.

Seeing this lack of response from the initial chemo, the doctors on my mother's cancer team huddled together and decided that they needed to change the gameplan and put together another cocktail of toxic goo to see if it would work better. So they started her on this new drug cocktail on September 29th.

Whereas with the old chemo cocktail, the effects were not as pronounced; sure my mom lost most of her hair and got kinda tired, but for the most part she soldiered on through it without displaying a lot of the common negative side effects that you envision someone having after mainlining a couple of bags of highly toxic chemicals.

The new stuff, however, wasn't as easily brushed off; my mother got sick not 20 minutes after they finished her first session, and remained so for the next 6 or so days. My birthday was on Sunday of that week, October the 5th, and she sounded kinda rough when she wished me a happy birthday.

In addition to that, my mother's rib began to really cause her quite a lot of pain. So much so, that her doctors decided to use radiation on the rib to see if they could alleviate the pain there. Unfortunately, the position she had to remain in during the radiation treatment only seemed to aggravate the pain, and in the end, my sisters had to urge her doctors to prescribe some pretty powerful narcotic pain medicines to bring it down to a manageable level.

On top of all that, my mother had a rather bad fall outside of the Marshall's department store in Potomac Mills Mall. She and my sister were shopping for warmer clothes for the winter and as they left, my mother got tripped up either by her own feet or by some unevenness of the hardwood floor and went down like a sack of bricks. The impact caused her glasses to cut into her left cheek and blackened her eye, and she also ended up having to get stitches just above her eyebrow where her head hit the hardwood floor and then bled all over it. My mother, in discussing this event, admits that those were some really seriously hard hardwood floors!

When my partner John went through chemotherapy, the idea of him not living through it never entered my mind. Sure, he thought about it and mentioned it a few times, but I brushed aside that kind of stuff and assured him he'd get through it and be fine. The idea of him dying from it was just inconceivable to me; and so I just did all I could do to keep him eating as much as I could to keep his weight up, and keep him well-rested and as happy as I could make him. It seemed to be easy to be strong enough for both of us.

Last weekend, I was finally able to wrangle a kind of free weekend so I drove up to Alexandria to stay with my folks and spend some time with my Mom and Dad. When I saw my mom, who had always seemed to loom so much larger than life, from back when I was just a kid, to even after I'd grown up and made my own life, laying ever so still on her bed as she rested, all wrapped up in the small prayer blanket John had given her when she was diagnosed with cancer. I couldn't help but think that she looked so small, so frail and so very, very sick laying there, and it just hurt my heart to see her like that. I stood there silently watching her rest and really wondered why I didn't feel the same undefinable assuredness that I'd felt with John -- that blind faith that made me so sure that he'd pull through everything. I mean, I really wanted to feel it. I want more than anything to see my mom beat this cancer, get better and live for the next however the hell many years she lives. But as I stood there, all I felt was upset, helpless and scared. (and if you know me, those are three emotions that I simply cannot abide.)

One of the things my sisters and I agree on is that this whole thing with my mom is totally unexpected. She's been healthy as a horse for most of her life. I feel bad saying it, but we all expected to go through this with my Dad, but never with Mom. My Dad's health has been up and down since he was in his early 40s, and he's now pulled ahead in his private competition with Steve Austin, the Bionic Man, for total replacement operations.

I know that, with my parents a state or so away, and with John's iffy, ever changing, roller-coaster-like medical condition, I've not been able to be Johnny-on-the-spot for my Mom like I was for John during his treatment. My sister Kathy has been the one captaining that particular chemo cruise ship, along with my cancer cruise director sister Dee, who seems almost Italian-esque in her determination to see how fast she can drive from Columbus, Ohio to Alexandria, Va on her days off to stay with my folks and help out. Avanti! Dee! Avanti! They've been able to spend a lot more time with Mom during her treatment, which is probably for the best as I've had my hands full with John, the dogs, and work. I would not be nearly the patient-advocate that either of my elder two sisters are, and would probably do my mother no favors by using my own style of painfully direct communications interspersed heavily with sarcasm and invective to try and motivate her medical personnel.

But sometimes I can't help but feel like "the bad son." I can barely make enough money to pay my half of the mortgage, my car note and my other bills, let alone send extra money up to my sister to help her pay for my parents temporary apartment in Bellevue or to help with their medical bills like my other two sisters are doing. I know that this whole thing is really sucking Kathy and my other two sisters financially dry, and it seems like there's nothing I can do to help... and it makes me feel like a total schmuck. It's a guy thing, I'm sure, but it is what it is and I can't help but feel what I feel.

Anywho... back to my sister Kathy and the meatloaf interruptus phone call. So, as she talked to me, she got really sad, as people in bars sometimes do when emotionally charged up and half-crocked, telling me through tears that she wanted me to make up a Flash movie of still photos of us and mom and put it to a nice "mom positive" song, as I'd done for a Mother's Day present a few years back when I used a bunch of photos of us from when we were growing up. I put that movie to the Backstreet Boys song, "The Perfect Fan" and, after some large display of emotion, my mother said it was the nicest Mother's Day present she'd ever been given. So as soon as I get some photos from all my sisters and other relatives, I'll go ahead and do that. I just need to find a good song to put it to and it'll practically create itself. It seems the least I can do, I guess.

As she talked, Kathy mentioned that she was worried that we'll drift apart if we lose our parental anchors, but I don't believe that'll be the case. There's an saying in Latin, "Prosapia quid cohaerere pervadere maximus difficultatises fiet evalescere.", which when translated roughly means, "The family that holds together through the greatest difficulties will be made to increase in strength." If that's the case, with all we've been through so far in our lives, not even counting mom's current condition, we already should be nearly unbreakable.

As someone who likes to have all his bases covered, however, I did something the other night that I very rarely do. I went with John to the Candlelight Compline Service at his church, the Chapel of The Cross in Chapel Hill, NC and sitting in the dark, surrounded by students, frankincense smoke and singing, I asked God to give my Mom a break. Between staying married to my father, raising the 4 of us, and putting in 60+ hour work weeks well into her mid-60s just to make ends meet, she should be getting put on the short-list for sainthood, not sitting around in some hospital or temporary apartment wasting away from cancer.

It's funny, when people find out that John's an ordained minister, they tend to be shocked, so I jokingly tell them that I'm looking after this life for us, while John looks after the next one. The current policies of the Catholic Church towards gays and lesbians have left me a disastrously lapsed Catholic, though I've never doubted that God is looking down and keeping watch on me, though I'm sure he's occasionally scratching his head in bewilderment and saying to his chorus of angels, "What in the name of Me is he playing at down there?!?"

I've come to believe that God made me the way I am, and that because of that, me being gay doesn't make me a sinner as God wouldn't have made me gay if that really was the case. After all, He's a deity, not a reality TV show producer. I have resigned myself to believing that some of his proxies here on earth have "dropped the ball" on the whole gay issue, and are just pushing their own prejudices off as gospel.

I don't often ask God for things. I figure, with all the Christians in the world constantly asking for this, that or the other, he's really got enough people barking up his tree, and that it's probably in my own best interests to be a little more self-dependant in working out my own problems and issues instead of praying and hoping for some divine intervention. I am also hoping that, since God usually doesn't hear all that much outta me, He might be more inclined to listen as this particular situation with my Mom is not within my ability to set right and maybe then he'll do me a solid and make with the divine intervention.