happy to be home

At 4 o’clock this morning, I called out, “Honey!” Almost instantaneously, “Coming Momma!” from a 14 year old who has been elevated to heroine status for reasons that will become clear as I try to make a point about what coming home means. At the same time, from the den, another “Coming honey!” – my wise and worn-out husband who has experienced waiting more than anyone I know, more than anyone should. Waiting and watching for years until an aortic abdominal aneurysm grew to just the right size for a surgery that would repair it and allow him to retire. 

During that wait, it never once occurred to me to think about how many minutes he must have spent fraught with fear, how many seconds he spent confronting his own mortality.  It was different for me. According to my math,  from the day I felt an approximation to a lump on my right breast until the day the surgeon told us the lymph nodes were clear and that she could find all the cancer she could see, it had been 2 months and 20 days. Cancer had come to our door 1, 944 hours ago. 116,640 minutes. 6,998,400 seconds.

In the wee hours of this morning, the trio that is my family has been thrust into a scene resembling an out-take from M.A.S.H. except without the laugh track. Bleary-eyed, two thirds of my family burst into the bedroom to find me needing to lean on them so I could get out of bed, stand up, and walk to the toilet. Bedraggled, bent over, with  too-long tubes draining bloody stuff from incision sites on my pale body, I had to ask for help. Otherwise a healthy 48 year old, I am for now dependent on my husband and my child. 

My desire to get out of the hospital so quickly – just three days after eight hours of surgery that included the removal of my right breast and its reconstruction using arteries and muscle and fat from my abdomen – did not take into account that the granting of this wish would have ramifications for other people. My gentle 14 year-old daughter,  whose only preoccupation should be acne and periods and making friends, would instead choose to don rubber gloves to clean and then record on a chart, the color and quantity of the contents of surgical drains 1, 2, and 3, attached to my underarm and at either end of a large hip-to-hip incision. That my husband would have to sleep on the couch because our bed would have to be transformed to accommodate almost every pillow and cushion in our house to ensure I would be reclined at least 45 degrees with my feet elevated.

Still in a postoperative fog that I can only attribute to the vast quantities of Dilaudid that had coursed through my veins for four days, I find myself spending a few weird moments thinking about E.T. wanting to phone home. H-O-M-E  Never has the word meant so much to me. It is indeed where the heart is.

Later this morning, the sound of weekly yard work wafted in. Afraid it would disturb the rest the doctor said I so badly needed, my husband sat down and told me a story, the details of which have stayed with him for over 40 years. 

He had been working with a construction crew assigned to repair a water pipe in Tempe. The week prior, signs had been posted on lamp-posts in the neighborhood to advise residents  that the water pipe repair would necessitate early morning use of machinery – the noisy kind: dump-trucks and backhoes that would be operated by laborers yelling to each other as they dug up and replaced the pipe. 

On the day the work began, an elderly man had rushed out to confront them, arms flailing. Visibly upset, he complained that the noise was disturbing his wife who lay in their home, dying of cancer. He begged them to stop making so much noise so she could rest. Life and its work goes on as it must, and they couldn’t stop the job. It moves me to hear this recalled as though it happened just yesterday, to know that these men paused before continuing their work on down the road. While they could not silence the machinery, they used hand signals not words to complete the job as quietly as they could. 

He went outside and told the landscaper to come back next week.