Right after I got done telling my radiation oncologist buddy that, despite my immediate family’s medical leanings, I’m not a doctor because rocks and data don’t talk back to you, I got a call from Herr Doktor Brother. My grandma’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is here again. It has manifested itself in the past as colon cancer and now as a naso-pharyngial lymphoma, hindering her abilities to breathe and swallow. Grandma’s three choices are radiation, chemotherapy or a breathing tube. For someone who has never eaten meat, smoked a marlboro cigarette or had a sip of alcohol in her life, her cancers have been extremely atypical. Why does disease pick on this sweet and clean-living woman who described her last round of chemo and radiation as the most demeaning and defeating experience of her life?
Of course, the entire family of doctors and medical professionals is in Ohio and on the case, and send me updates as and when they feel like it. It’s like I’m not in the Cool V-R Doctors’ Club. Never mind that I understand almost all of it in every gory detail, I cannot help personally.
That, right there, is the downside of not being a doctor and far, far away from my beloved Midwest.
What I can do is enjoy every sandwich.
Maybe it’s the quality of your writing, or my way of reading it, but it sounds like you have a strength in all of this that none of the MDs do… looking past the medicine and right at the person. In my experience with this sort of stuff, sometimes that role can be the most important. I’m so sorry your family is facing this.
Thanks, Holly, that’s very sweet of you. This is probably why I’m the family genealogist, the one who cares about stories and the over-arching evolution of the family. How and when people lived, more so than how and when they suffered and died, is a lot more inspiring.
Your the rock..that is why you love them. You be the rock for the family.
I’m so sorry. The whole quasi-lack of updates can be frustrating. Hang in there.