everything in this place seems like a miniature to me; the countertops of my parents' house are shorter, the doorframes set lower. i wander through a dollhouse version of my childhood, barely brushing the depths of my own past. yet even while i am always the tallest in the room, i stand with my hands clasped behind my back and feel tiny, awkward, and helpless. so many machines. so much noise, beeping and whirring, clicking and pumping, these automated life-tenders, every doctor tending to a different organ or function of the body--veins, bowels, blood, urine, breathing, liver, and of course the tumor.
ironically it is the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation treatment which has brought us to our current impasse. the tumor's activity has shrunk from 20 to 6, and its size along with it; because it is no longer placing the same amount of pressure on her bile duct, the stint that had been placed there to keep it draining properly had come loose last wednesday night, sending her into septic shock. after surviving the critical first 24 hours of this complication, they found that she had fluid surrounding her lungs and several blood clots within the same area. so in this hospital bed she remains, full of wires and tubes, her skin faintly (though encouragingly faded) yellow, her hair a bristle of grey the likes of which i'd never witnessed so dramatically. the burgundy and fuschia tones she prefers fade at the edges of each follicle.
her feet are swollen and her face is sunken, though overall her size and shape seem unchanged. over the last two days i've watched her grow more restless and listened to the unsettling rasp in her voice diminish, though not disappear. she is frustrated by her inability to sit up of her own accord, and it is this very frustration that encourages me--this is the spark flashing behind her eyes, piercing the cloudiness of dilaudid and engendering a fiercer fight, if for no other reason than knowing the panic and fear behind my own gaze, pleading for an end of helplessness.
my father's pastor came in today, and i almost introduced myself as "the heathen in california." instead i held my tongue and listened to his sermon, stood (but later sat) long enough to reach the end of his prayer to jesus. my mother thanked me for being so enduring of such a missionary barrage, to which i replied: "i did my best to hear the intent instead of the delivery." she liked that.
i've been thrown into a game already in progress, and i don't know its rules. i do my best to keep up, and i do my best to appear competent in the face of these circumstances in which i understand barely more than what i control.
-ss