Two divergent paths

Good Afternoon All:

Again, I must apologize for the time between posts. I dissassembled most computers in the house to make room for some electrical work to be done and just got them put back together again last night. Appointments and schedules since Tuesday this past week have been pretty whirlwind and so finding a few moments to write a worthy post has been difficult. There is a topic of substance that I want to address with this post and I didn't want to short change it while balancing a laptop in the outpatient clinic and dodging nurses and bags of red blood cells.

On the eve of my last post my support team lost another member. Tuesday night my paternal grandmother, Martha Flickinger (she'd been divorced and remarried, hence the name difference), died of cancer. Like most cancer patients and survivors I have a fair amount of family history of cancer. This is my second grandparent to die of the disease and 3 of 4 have had more than one form/occurrence of the disease.

Grandma Flickinger had had breast cancer some time ago and some time after I was diagnosed cancer was found in her bladder. We spoke on the phone somewhere between my diagnosis and the time while her diagnosis was still pending. She conveyed at that time the conviction that she again had cancer based on what evidence existed--true to the outlook I've tried to maintain during treatment I took the optimistic route and suggested other possibilities. Needless to say, my grandmother and her medical team knew more than I did.

I've done a little bit of reading during my treatment about the mental state of patients. In one book the author speculated that many medical professionals simply do not wish to live to a ripe old age. They have spent a good portion of their lives witnessing the broad spectrum of human health and spent an inordinate amount of time treating those that were in the worst shape. The author continued to propose that for this reason health professionals when faced with a diagnosis like cancer would be more apt to resign themselves to the disease. It is an interesting hypothesis and one that I suppose could apply to my grandmother as she spent some time as a nurse. Perhaps it was from this sort of vantage point that she made her decision to forgo treatment for the cancer in her bladder or perhaps she simply didn't have the energy for the fight. In any event, she made her decision and the point of no return for receiving treatment came and went. She was cared for by Hospice and visiting nurses and she passed away in reported comfort in her own apartment Tuesday evening.

Since learning of her diagnosis and her decision to not receive treatment I have been wrestling with my grandmother's circumstance. The mere fact that our diagnoses were so close chronologically has created a link in my own mind between her experience with cancer and my own. While we may have started from similar starting points, our paths were divergent from the outset. I chose to be treated and resolved to beat the disease, she opted to forgo treatment. I have continued to keep my head up and to look to the future while she prepared for the end of life. It should come as no surprise, then, that our paths lead to very different places: while I begin to prepare for post-treatment life my grandmother's came to an end.

And yet, from the time I learned of her decision to not seek treatment the link I felt to her cancer diagnosis was a bit singed. There was always a nagging thought that her decision could have some weight or bearing on my outcome in some cosmic or karma-based way. The inevitablity of her death just seemed hard to accept, reconcile and to witness while I fought so hard to move in the other direction. The understanding and support I felt for her decision could not have jived with the attention that I was paying daily to getting better. For that reason we did not interact much during her final months. Prior to this we didn't call or write each other regularly though under other circumstances I feel certain that I would have reached out to her a bit more. Instead we kept tabs on each other through reports from my father.

These details come across as cold as I read them but I think both of us were rightly introspective with regard to the other's situation. My recovery from cancer and my grandmother's death from it are journeys that require stamina, courage, and rely on periodic displays of grim determination to get through the trying times. The strength for each of us to move to our desired outcomes simply would have been hard to come by if we kept running back to the point where our paths diverged to check on each other.

My grandmother was rooting for me to get better in the same way that I supported her decision not to. Along with the sadness that comes from her dying there is also a sense that part of my attention that had been wrested away out of concern for her has been released to return to the business of completing treatment and being cured of cancer. So perhaps the link between us is there still--out of her decision to die from her cancer perhaps I have been given the final burst of strength and determination I will need to complete my course of treatment and to achieve a cure for mine. It seems to me that I can honor and remember her best in this way and so I have resolved to do just that.