What is hope? I’ll spare you the dictionary definition. Thank my laziness for the reprieve from the high school device of introducing a theme. No, there is no whimsical resolution at the end with some quote from Gandhi or Jesus or Martin Luther King, Jr. There is no query of what you should be doing for your country. This is to you, dear friend. What is hope? When does it become desperate?
The days seem to unfurl with no apparent difference from each moment to moment. My mother and I, we have become accustomed to the atrociously poor processes at LACUSC. When her PICC line became occluded, when her colon was perforated, when her stomach was obliterated…all these things were mere shit toppings on a craptastic sundae. I know, poor and lazy metaphor. What I’m saying is that these instances are the filigrees on a baroque catastrophe. (here’s a note: when you’re scared and worried that your mother is going to die, don’t look up the survival rates of biliary cancer…here’s a hint it starts with number 0 and ends with it…discuss).
Today my mother and I had a visit with the oncologist. This is standard procedure, to follow up with them every four weeks to assess whether there might be any complications, whether doses for medications need to be increased, whether things are supposed to go the way they should, given what the circumstances are. Though our appointment was for 8 a.m., we were able to meet the doctor by 8:45 a.m. This is spectacularly fast. The first matter was whether she was feeling okay. She was. The second matter was her jaundice. I may have mentioned the morbid thought of whether one can tell if an Asian person has jaundice. Turns out you can, and it’s pretty fucking easy to tell. Some weeks ago, my mother’s eyes have turned yellow, as has her skin, especially along her belly. In the sunlight, her eyes look like lemons, and I can’t turn away. She’s caught me staring and has asked why I was doing so. Of course, I tell her it’s because she’s pretty. Which is true in some sense, because I’ve been attempting to etch her face into my brain. I don’t want to forget, though I know time will ravage my memory of her, and I shall be left with a decayed relic. It is inevitable, and every picture will be a false sketch. She is not two dimensional, and she never was a 5x7.
As her liver enzymes have crept perilously upward, we’re facing the possibility of liver failure. She will be taken off of the chemo regimen, and Phase I alternatives will be the next step. The chemo doesn’t work. The cancer has spread further.
