The Blog of mamapolo

I should not be here now writing this, my first ever blog entry. I should be in bed, sleeping, for I have much to do tomorrow.

On Monday I plan to return to my job as a caseworker at the Dept. of Welfare for the first time in sixty-six days. I can scarcely believe it has been that long. In another sense, it seems I have forever been here, or at one hospital or another, or waiting long hours in a doctor's office, waiting for someone to tell us how our future will pan out.

They are all the same, those offices, uncomfortable chairs with nubby linen seats, the same magazines rumpled and frayed with hard use, the same brochures in the racks along the walls. The rancid smell of fear hangs in the air, mingling with the odor of alcohol and air fresheners. Each person in each seat dreads the doctor will tell them something they are not prepared to hear. The doctors and the nurses, too, are similar. Busy bustling people who listen with ill-concealed impatience to the things you think are important for them to hear.

They tell you devastating truths in a calm serene tone as though it was a weather report or a recipe, and for them, it is. For you it is life itself, for them it is business as usual. They are as kind as they can be.

I met my husband nearly seven years ago now, on line. We chatted on MSN Messenger for months, and I found him very 'attractive' because he is well-spoken and well-read. He could spell, and knew the uses of punctuation. I found that sexy.

At the time, I was renting a basement apartment from a friend I had also met on line - playing bridge on MSN Zone. That is another story, my friendship with Banzai kitty - Lee. She is gone now, passed away two years ago, and her last years were difficult and grim. I wish it weren't so. I wish our final years could be passed as our beginning years usually are - with tender care and much laughter and the joy of learning new things.

We met, we courted, and in a series of ridiculous events, I found myself without a place to stay, thirty-six hours out of an appendectomy. He said, "Come here and be my love," and I did. I feared he had asked me out of pity and duty, but when I arrived, he had taken the time to have a special engraved brass door knocker made with both our last names on it. When I saw it and looked at him, he said, "So you know you really are wanted here."

I did not know before that it is worse to hear a doctor read out a diagnosis like a judge sentencing a felon when the judgement he reads is on a person you love and not yourself. You would know how you felt, what you feared. You do not know that about your husband.

I had a poor husband. I know what a good husband is. He is my husband. He has supported me, encouraged me, badgered me when necessary to reach for all that I had come to think was beyond me.

We talked a lot. Books we were reading, music we'd discovered, movies we loved, people we knew. Our children and their triumphs and disasters. About our lives before we met. Our favorite foods, our favorite jokes. Our losses, our gains. We ate out constantly, in fact, prior to his illness I had probably not prepared a dozen meals in a half-dozen years, although I am a good cook. Either he cooked, or we dined out, because his position was that 'his girl' should not have to slave in the kitchen after she came home from work. It was difficult to find fault with that opinion.

If I said, "Let's go here and do this," we went there and did that. If I said, "Let's meet so-and-so and have dinner," we went. He was generous with his money, with his time, and most importantly, with his heart.

He was career military for 23 years, a paratrooper, and has 800+ parachute jumps to his credit. He was a sailor, a pilot, a car enthusiast who took a race car driving course in France and never got over it. My knuckles were often white, hanging on to the 'oh shit' handle above the passenger door.

He raised his daughter after his first wife left both of them for an optometrist when the baby was eighteen months old, and when his daughter was grown and gone to her own life, he put his own loneliness and need for love on hold again to look after his ill and aging mother.

After he was discharged from military service, he became a social worker and prospered there, too. And when he retired as a supervisor from a welfare agency, he taught himself to be a fine machinist. In his basement shop, he designed and produced the prototype for a miniature Morse code (telegraph) key, which he still makes. It is marketed through a large company. A few months ago, the Saab company, which not only makes autos but planes and other things, asked his distributor to contact him and ask that he sign a contract with them to make his key for a field radio they were making for the Swedish military. He declined, saying he did not want to 'get big.'

He makes small wonders in his shop downstairs - little special brass screws to repair a damaged antique key for a collector, tiny springs. He has clients all over the world - Greece, Bolivia, Spain, Australia.

He quit smoking ten years ago, but not soon enough. Or maybe it was Agent Orange from Vietnam, the same substance that the Veteran's Administration believes caused his diabetes. Or maybe it was just an evil gremlin of fate, or some divine plan that is beyond my comprehension. Something nurtured carcinogens in his left lung and then sent poisons to his marvelous brain.

And we went from a mild concern about a flu bug he apparently had onto a screaming horrified ride through the medical machinery. Brain surgery, diabetic comas, a terrible fall causing a broken arm and a subdural hematoma (brain bleed). In six weeks, he had eight separate and individual life-threatening episodes.

It has been an indescribable nightmare. And the worst of it is, now that he is 'better' and probably can be left alone, he is still not himself. I don't know if he will ever be again.

I had surgery when I was 24 and recovered in days, again when I was 35 and recovered in weeks. At 51, it took me two months to recover from the appendectomy. Your body does not remember good health as well when you are older, and he is much older than 51.

The radiation took his hair, which of all our losses is the smallest. The other plagues took his sharp wit, his quick mind, his balance. I thought it took his sense of humor, too, but that is returning, slowly. Thank you, God.

He still takes (took?) violin lessons (he is a fine mandolin player, not bad on the banjo, dynamite on the Irish tin whistle and harmonica, and trying to learn concertina) and last evening I took him for a visit to his 85 yr old violin teacher. She and the men (both in their 40's) who have the lesson slots on either side of his, missed him and wanted to see for themselves that he was still alive and kicking.

His teacher is a gifted musician, but she has poor people skills. She is negative and I finally told her during a phone conversation that if she expressed any of those negative opinions about my husband's health prospects in front of him I would see to it that they never spoke again. At her home, my husband gave her a score for a waltz by Susan Voelz that Ms. Voelz had sent him via email as a gesture of true gracious humanity. (He had fallen in love with the piece after hearing it on the Dow Chemical commerical "The Human Element" and we had tried to track down the sheet music without success. Finally I stumbled across Ms. Voelz's My Space address and wrote to her, explaining our circumstances, and imploring her to tell us where to buy the music. She answered that she hadn't written it down yet, but she would that very afternoon, and she did, and emailed it to us.)

She played it - she is a fine violinist, and he was content to hear the piece again. Then her next student, a young girl, was brought in by her father. He was a cold and unresponsive person who sat down in a corner and telegraphed plainly that he did not care to talk to any of the five others of us by opening a book.

The violin teacher still made introductions. Of the newcomer, she said, "He is an attorney in town." Of my husband, she said, "He has brain cancer."

You could have heard a pin drop in the room. Even the cold distant bastard in the corner with the book knew enough about being a human being that he knew he should respond SOMEHOW to that, but was at a loss for something to say.

I finally said, "Wow, that was some introduction," and the mood broke and everyone laughed. And then I said, "That's what he HAS, not who he IS."

Some of the people I have told that I am returning to work have been deeply offensive to me by asking, "Is he okay to be left alone?" or "Are you sure that's wise?"

I feel like screaming, "No, I really don't care whether he lives or dies - I'm just going back to work because that's what I want to do, and he's on his own."

What a stupid question.

Could something happen to him between 7:45 when I leave in the morning and 12 noon when I come home to check on him? Yes, of course it could. Could something happen to me in the same period of time? Yes.

Nothing is sure, nothing is certain. He has recovered enough that he is sick of being monitored 24/7 and he needs some space. I understand that. I'm sick of me, too.

I pray that this decision is the right one. I pray he will be fine, that he will not fall, that his sugar levels will not plummet, that he will not be afraid or sad alone.

Life is what happens while you're making other plans. Truer words were never spoken.