Comfort-er

I’m not going to the ER anymore. Every time I go I end up in the hospital.

I’m pretty good at just taking things one step at a time and not looking back or too far ahead. But it’s been a long year. And when you have time on your hands, the kind of time you have when you’re alone in a hospital room for a week with a clear view of San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, from your window on the 6th floor of Summit Hospital, it’s hard to not wander mentally and take stock. The thought that returned to me again and again: “I don’t want to be a chair at the wedding.” Then I’d cry and feel sorry for myself. And then my family or my best friend would show up and pull me back to a happier place.

“It’ll be easy,” they said. “Basically no side effects,” they said. The histotripsy went off without a hitch. As soon as the procedure was done, they did a CT scan to confirm they got all the tumor. Done and done.

Except…

Except for a 15 pound weight gain, intolerable nausea, and pain that landed me in the ER just five days later with a raging infection, my kidneys failing, and my heart caught in the crossfire. What followed was days of elimination — symptom or root cause, which was which. In the end: an Acute Kidney Injury. Good news is my kidneys are just about back at full function, there’s no lasting damage to my heart, and the infection is gone.

Of all the histotripsy procedures documented worldwide, there is one other case that resulted in some kind of kidney complication. Not as drastic as mine.

The night at the ER, I was finally admitted at 5:30am. At that point it didn’t make sense for Billy to go home. He grabbed Wren’s comforter from the back of the car — I meant to drop it off at the dry cleaners but hadn’t. He slept on the pull out pleather hospital chair, then proceeded to snore straight through the various disruptions, blood draws, and vitals that kept me awake. I alternatively felt grateful for a partner by my side and rage at his audacity to sleep, let alone snore, wanting to absolutely beam him in the head with the Mentos on the table next to me.

I keep Mentos on hand because I can taste the saline flush when they push it through an IV line or my chemo port. Not everyone is as unlucky. But I am. Eating a Mento when they push the saline helps. I can’t even explain this one. But it’s a thing.

When he left that morning to get Wren to school, I was left with a lovely comforter. It’s not overly special as comforters go, but it’s cozy and it’s hers and smells like all her lovely lotions and potions. I slept most of that next day in a quiet room.

That evening, my night nurse walked in on me crying and vomiting into the trash can in the dark, my stupid hospital gown falling off. Once again I think of the line in Kate Bowler’s book about her own Stage 4 cancer journey: “the first thing to go is pride.”

She scooped me up and helped me into bed, and tucked me into my comforter.

My comforter. Not just a thing that goes on top of a bed. Not just a thing that needs to get washed. But a thing that brings comfort. A comfort-er. My comfort-er. The nurse commented on how cozy it looked. I told her it was my daughter’s.

In the dark, she told me a story about her own daughter, now a surgeon, who had a comforter from when she was a baby that she loved so much she brought it with her to college. One day she called her mom to say it had a few holes. She had bought some gold thread to sew it back together, and as she carefully stitched this thing so precious to her, she imagined it as someone’s mother, or child, on the operating table. She paid careful attention to every stitch. She told her mom that as she stitched the blanket, she realized she wanted to be a surgeon.

It was a hard week. My kidneys were slow to recover, which meant they weren’t efficient at cleaning the toxins from my blood. I couldn’t keep food down. I’ve always been a pretty demure barfer — is it weird to admit I say that with a sense of pride? I can go a whole night with a raging stomach flu and wake no one. But again and again I found myself over the trash can sounding like what I can only describe as old man Jenkins down at the junkyard. I imagined my poor neighbor calling down to the nurses station: “hey, maybe check on that old man in the next room because there are some god awful noises coming from there and it’s keeping me awake.”

Wren had a particularly hard time this time. One night she called me, unable to sleep, crying that she missed me and wanted to be with me please. Her cry broke my heart and I cried too. “How about tomorrow Dad takes you and gets Starbucks and you just come here instead of school and we can spend the day together.”

On one hand, the right thing is probably to keep things normal. Send her to school. Reassure her. Don’t give in to the fear. But this isn’t normal. And she’s 13. And she’s scared. And I am too. And what if all I want is one whole day with her next to me? Because what if I am just a chair at the wedding someday?

It’s really hard to know how to parent well through this. I want everyone to be strong — strong enough to maybe lose their mom. I want to be strong enough to say goodbye should it come to that. But I’m not. And they are not.

I vacillate between teaching them to sew their own damn blankets, you can’t expect people to do things for you in life, and stepping in with my gold thread, surgically stitching together every frayed edge with a beautiful memory, making sure to provide the kind of comfort only a mom can. Because I can.

Wren and I spent most of the day under her comforter talking. Mostly about nothing. Mostly we just laid close together.

I’m not afraid to die. But I am afraid to say goodbye. To not be there to comfort. To be an empty chair at the wedding.