KATE
This is Kate’s story, about worry and panic and the compassion of friends. I knew her for many years. We went through Catholic girls’ school together, and that cemented our relationship forever! She’s a tall woman with kind blue eyes and a shy manner. She’s the best friend anyone could ever have. She is never loud or demanding, never making a fuss, just there like an oak tree, solid and still. Listen to her voice as I did, in quiet and gentle tones, filled with wonder and the appreciation of living every day. Kate is filled with blessings.
It all started with a lump, like many other such stories. A lump in my throat that just was there one day. I was getting ready for my youngest daughter’s wedding, and I put a necklace on, and it stuck out funny across my neck. I didn’t say anything to anyone of course, this was not the day to tell everyone that I thought I had cancer. They would have said, ‘oh, stop being such a hypochondriac, you’re always saying you think you have something terrible and it always turns out to be nothing.’ That’s true, I worry a lot, but not just about me. I worry about my daughters and whether they’re happy and healthy, and I worry about my grandchildren, if someone will harm them, and are they happy and healthy. I worry about the planet and the environment and all the gross things we’re doing to it. I worry about the leaders of the country, how can they manage to be just people and have such great responsibilities. And that day, on my youngest daughter’s wedding day, I worried about having cancer.
How long was it there? I don’t know, doctor. All of a sudden it was there and it hadn’t been there before. But before when I don’t know. I don’t feel my throat a lot, even though I worry about things, so I don’t know. The doctor was kind and gentle and felt my neck, and left the room and I sat there and wondered what he was doing. Why did he leave and not say anything? Should I get dressed? Turns out what he was doing was calling a colleague of his and they agreed that I needed to go see this other doctor right away. My doctor was a general practitioner and he was sending me to a specialist. Then I really had something to worry about.
After another bunch of tests they decided that it was thyroid cancer, and I went through all the emotional stuff that everyone goes through with that kind of a diagnosis. Fear, anger, lots of anger. Panic, hysterics, that feeling of something invading your body without your permission and taking over and maybe killing you. A feeling of being helpless while this invader rushes around overcoming all your defenses, physical and mental.
They asked if there had been stress in my life for the past few years and I nearly laughed. My mother had died first, and then my father. Over the span over several years, it was hell taking care of them. I never resolved a lot of past things with my parents, and when they died it was too late. My daughters had lived with me part of the time, moved in and out, and there was never any peace, never any rest. For those years I just did what I had to do and moved like a robot, doing things as if I were made out of wood. I remembered back in grade school, what the nuns told us. We didn’t really have a body below the neck, that was all stuff no one talked about, so our duty was to look after other people and never mind us. Put everyone else first, and at the end of the day if there’s five minutes of exhausted time left, think about the fires of hell and eternal punishment. And we believed it. We sat there in our little blue jumpers and white blouses and soaked it all up and internalized it and the anger grew.
When the doctor told me I had cancer it’s as if my brain took a vacation. The part of me that talked and read books and remembered who the Chief Justice is just left, and another, deeper part of me took over. The surgeon explained that when he did the operation, if he cut a nerve to my heart I would die on the table, and if he cut the nerve to my vocal cords I would never talk again. I listened to him, and asked dutiful questions and kept a little notebook and wrote everything down. Everything that anyone said, I wrote it down. I found that notebook a couple of years later and read it and cried. It sounds like someone taking notes in a mental hospital.
After the surgery I could still talk, and no important nerves were cut, they all did a great job. I had walls full of funny cards, and my grandchildren sent crayon pictures, and I had flowers and balloons. I had friends and neighbors and they all rallied around and visited. It was a wonderful recovery. But when I got home I realized there was one thing I didn’t have. A thyroid. I felt like a giant snail, moving like molasses. I had no energy so something spiritual inside, that deeper part of me that I felt before, took over again and made me rest and meditate and learn to prioritize things. I learned to think about myself and not feel guilty. I learned that even though my parents were dead and I couldn’t resolve things with them, at least I could resolve them inside myself. I told the nuns to go away and bother someone else, those old lessons were past and done with, and I was moving on.
And then they gave me a radioactive cocktail. I went to the cancer center at St. Joseph’s
She was a retired social worker, her husband a retired teacher. They both volunteered and worked with Alzheimer’s patients, since her mother had died of the disease and his sister had just been diagnosed with it. They were worried about him, he had had three heart attacks and she fussed over his blood pressure and his diet. They were in their seventies, faces lined and hands callused from working and gardening. They loved to square dance, and the sparkle in their eyes testified to their light hearts, despite the heaviness of years.
“She’s been a big help to me.” Kate sat at the table with the literature spread in front of her, and signed people up for the five kilometer ‘memory walk’. She was a woman in her middle fifties, short gray hair, large kind brown eyes. OR “You’ve met Kate before, she is a woman in her middle fifties, and old friend from high school…etc.
“When I was diagnosed with the thyroid cancer and had radiation, she was right there. I had only been volunteering for a few months and she hardly knew me, but she was right there helping. I called her the day I got that panic attack....” she looked down at her hands. “I was at work, and had gone through the radiation, and everything was supposedly OK and I could get on with my life. I sat in my office and started shaking, and it was a full blown panic attack all right. I called Esther and she told me to call Kathy Logan at PLTC, gave me the phone number, and then called back to make sure I was OK. She went with me that first time, I’ll never forget it.”
“No cancer problems in the family,” Esther had said, “just that memory thing where we all forget who we are and where the bathroom is. Don’t know which is worse.”
She was a plain spoken woman from Oklahoma, tall, spare, didn’t talk much. Her husband was from Vermont, and he didn’t talk much either and we always figured there was a lot of silence in their house. The only time Kate saw Esther really light up and smile was with her support groups, the people who were caring for their family members with memory problems. They called it a long day, never being off duty, always watching and dealing with infantile behavior. Even the calmest and most understanding of relatives reached a breaking point.
“You’ve got to remember, they aren’t doing this on purpose.” Esther always said, firmly. “They aren’t deliberately forgetting where they are, who you are, or any of that.” She looked around the group at the faces of people who were stretched to their limit. “It seems like that, though, doesn’t it? It seems that they’re doing it on purpose, to drive you crazy. The day seems to be thirty hours long, doesn’t it?” They sighed and nodded, and knew that she had been where they were, she had walked on that hard path. It did them all good to know that, and Esther could relate to their problems. She could put them in a rational light, and not minimize their ordeal.
Kate was talking to me about her experience, and how she dealt with the radiation on her throat.
“There I was on the radiation table, with my hands at my side, trying to relax. I kept trying to tell myself it would be OK, I’ll be fine, I’ll see my grandchildren graduate from high school, and I’ll be around to boss my three daughters around for a long time. I kept telling myself that, and then my throat would close up and I couldn’t think, all I could think was, ‘I’ll never be able to talk again’.”
We had gone to school together, all the way from fourth grade through high school. I had left to go off to college in another state, Kate had stayed and got married, and then went back to school later on, when it was harder, with small children at home.
“I did it backwards, but it was the same road!” she used to laugh, when I came home from college, free as air, and she was struggling with babies, 15 months apart.
“You never were much of a talker,” I said, “you always were the quiet one.”
She nodded. “And then all I wanted to do was talk and talk and talk, so I could prove that I was OK after the thyroid cancer in my throat.” She sat there for a minute, quiet, looking into middle distance.
“And? What happened at PLTC?”
She looked up at me, remembering. (get her input here)
“So Esther knew about these folks, and how they could help?”
Kate laughed. “She always said being a social worker was a license to be nosy, but she really did know the resources around. Resources for everyone, not just people with memory problems. She had known Kathy Logan from a committee she was on, and remembered her.”
“So when Esther felt sick, and started to have abdominal pain, what did the Alzheimer’s group feel….” I asked.
“They knew something was wrong; it was so unlike her. She would get real quiet in the group meetings, and wouldn’t take little clerical jobs on like she used to. She just looked ill, and uncomfortable.” Kate looked away and sighed. “And then they did a scan and another test, and found that she had advanced ovarian and uterine cancer.”
“And her husband…”
“Devastated. He was so quiet and calm all the time before, but you could tell he was crazy about her. They had gone through a lot together, World War II, they lost a child in infancy, lots of problems. And it was him that was the sick one, he had three heart attacks and they figured it would be him to worry about. But you know, things happen….” Kate twisted napkin in her hands.
“It was very fast. I went to see her in the hospital, and she told them all not to do anything, she didn’t want surgery or chemo or anything. She just wanted to go home.”
They took her home and the hospices nurses came every day, and her husband Luke helped and did all the cooking, whatever she wanted, which wasn’t much. I brought some soup once, and she liked that. Mostly she just wanted puddings, or yogurt. So Luke kept the house clean and did the wash, and walked around looking stricken, and pale. We all worried about her, of course, but also him, with his history of heart disease. The hospice nurse was there for him as well, and kept track of his blood pressure. It didn’t look good, and then when she died, peacefully, he seemed to pull together and get stronger somehow. His kids were grown, but he was like a rock after her death for several months. He made plans to go on a trip, got the RV all ready, seemed a little happier. We all thought it was because she was no longer in pain, and at peace. But then, two months later, we lost him, too.”
“He had a heart attack and died right there on the spot, in his kitchen, putting something in he oven. His daughter was visiting and heard him cry out and ran to him. By the time they called the paramedics he was gone. I guess he couldn’t live without her, that’s the way it is sometimes, with couples who are really close.”
“So there it is, she was a big help to people, and got the help she needed when she was dying, and he did, too.” Kate looked steadily at me, her eyes bright with tears. “I guess help is there all the time, all you have to do is look for it.”
We sat for a minute in the quiet room at the Alzheimer’s office and listened to people come and go. I looked up at them, busy and preoccupied, eyes avoiding each other, intent on their own business. I wondered if they knew how much they needed, or would need of each other? Or is that something that no one even considers until the need arises? It’s just easier not to think about in the frantic pace of life, when there is little time for rest let alone contemplation of eternity.