Through The Kitchen Window

A young couple moves into a neighborhood.  The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the wife sees her neighbor outside hanging the wash on a clothesline.  "That laundry sure doesn't look very clean," she says to her husband over the breakfast table. "That woman must not know how to wash clothes correctly, or maybe she needs to use better laundry detergent."  The husband listens but doesn't comment.

The same thing happens again a couple of days later and then again a few days after that, and the pattern continues for several weeks.  Every time the wife sees the neighbor hanging her wash to dry, she makes the same comment, and the husband stays quiet.  

One day, though, the wife looks up from the breakfast table and says in a surprised voice, "Look! The clothes look clean!  I guess she's finally learned how to wash clothes correctly,  I wonder who taught her!"  The husband replies, "I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows."

And so it is with life ... what we see while watching others depends on the clarity of the window through which we look. 

Cancer Sucks

Reports came out today about former TV star Valerie Harper having been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.  

Harper, 73,  played Rhoda on the Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970 until 1974, after which she had her own spin-off show called "Rhoda" until 1978.  She wrote a tell-all book called "I, Rhoda" that came out in January this year.

She went through treatment for lung cancer in 2009; her diagnosis at this time is Leptomeningeal Carcinomatosis, or LC, which occurs when cancer cells, usually as a relapse from cancer originally in another part of the body, invade the subarachnoid space, enter the cerebrospinal fluid, and are transported throughout the central nervous system.  LC occurs in up to 8% of patients with cancer, most often in cases of lung cancers, breast cancers, GI tract cancers, and melanomas.  

I didn't know all of that about LC until recently.  I follow a blog - Family Bonding Time - about a husband and wife who were both diagnosed with cancer almost simultaneously, and the wife, who has breast cancer, was diagnosed in January with LC as well.  

In reading about it, I was shocked to learn that LC can come from the spread of GBM, the type of primary brain cancer that my dad had.  We had been told by the team of oncologists and neuro-oncologists that GBM almost never spreads and that we shouldn't be concerned about that for Dad.  (Looking back, I wonder if the reason they said that is because they suspected that he wouldn't last long enough for any spreading to occur.) Apparently in cases of LC, often nothing new shows up on scans because the cancer has spread into the spinal fluid rather than through an increase in the number or tumors or in tumor size.  Symptoms of LC, of course, are very similar to those of other types of brain cancer, including GBM, but a couple of the markers for LC listed in the information I read caught my eye: extreme lethargy and severe pain reported diffusely in the top of the head, both of which cannot be explained otherwise, as in they do not seem to be coming from other sources like a side-effect of medication or the location of a tumor.  Both of these things were true for my dad, especially during the last month of his life, when he was so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open (but oddly and torturously for him he couldn't sleep because of the massive doses of steroids he was on - because he kept reporting severe pain on the top of his head!).

I guess it doesn't matter, does it?  I guess they could have done a spinal tap to check for the presence of cancer cells in the spinal fluid - and actually they did consider doing that to check for meningitis at one point, but then they decided just to treat him with antibiotics that would treat any type of infection instead.  If they had found LC, in theory they could possibly have treated it with chemo administered through a catheter into that part of his brain, but honestly I doubt he could have tolerated or withstood that treatment, and I guess I'm glad we didn't have to make the decision of whether or not to put him through such a drastic intervention when it was not very likely to buy him much more time, if any, in his condition.  I will never get over the fact, though, that no one on the team of specialists who were assigned to Dad's case towards the end, could even venture to guess why he was going downhill so rapidly, especially after he had been given transfusions and heavy doses of medications to restore his blood counts to within normal limits.  "On paper, he should be better," his oncologist said, but he wasn't, and I will never forget those words.  

The Night My Husband Went Bald

Two days after my dad went on ahead, my siblings and I, our spouses, and our children all spent the night with my mom.  My brother-in-law Peter sat at the dining room table to work on creating a slideshow of photos of my dad to play at the memorial service the next day; with the rest of us taking turns handing him pictures to scan and giving input about what music to use, he worked on the project for hours into the night.  In other areas of the house, there was talking, comforting, and some crying going on; mostly I think we were all just trying to absorb what had happened and to keep ourselves together any way we could so that we could make it to and then through the memorial celebration we were hosting the next afternoon in my dad's honor.  

Just before midnight, we set up pallets on the floor of my parents' bedroom to the side of their bed, and then Mom and I went to bed in that room with the kids.  Exhausted, we fell asleep just minutes after we had closed the door to the room.

At some point in the night, I woke up and went upstairs to get in bed with my husband; the problem with that plan, though, was that when I'd gone to sleep downstairs it had not yet been determined where the other adults besides Mom and I were sleeping that night.  It was chilly upstairs, and I was anxious to get into a warm bed and go back to sleep.  I peeked into one bedroom and then into the other and saw two bodies in each bed, and so I looked in the TV room and saw a single person whom I deduced was my husband lying on an air mattress completely covered up with a sleeping bag.  I tucked in beside him, and he stirred a little in his sleep, causing the sleeping bag to shift and giving me a little bit of a view in the mostly dark room of his face and his head.  

In that moment, my heart skipped a beat. It was my husband's face, but it didn't look like his head: every bit of his hair was gone.

Without even thinking, I reached out a touched his head; he woke up and said, "I got my head shaved."  

"What???" I said, in disbelief.

"This way your mom can just look around for a bald guy at the memorial service if she needs anything," he explained, still half asleep.  

I was touched.  Shocked, because I'd had no idea that head-shaving was even being considered, but touched.  My dad was bald, as are my brother and both of my brother-in-laws; Kevin was the only adult male in the family with hair.

We went back to sleep for a few more hours, and then we got up and got ready for the gathering for the memorial.  All day I kept looking at Kevin's bald head and doing a double-take; he looked so different than he did with hair.  It somehow fit, though, in that place and time, as an act of tribute to my dad and as an act of protection and support for my mom and, by extension, for my sisters and me.  His newly bald head and even the grouping of the quartet of bald guys at the memorial were quite the topic of conversation, and thankfully it made getting through one of the hardest days of our lives a little bit easier.