Читать книгу All the Wild Hungers - Karen Babine - Страница 14

6

AGNES IS THE COLOR of fear, of orange cones and emergency vests, a color to startle, to wonder at the point where cancer has become the rule, not the exception. Every new diagnosis surprises me a little less. It’s cancer. It’s always cancer. It is fall in Minnesota and our days are getting shorter. I feel time as physical oppression. I am so angry in these days, my world a flare of bright orange. Anger is a secondary emotion, they say, a reaction to fear or vulnerability or frustration or injustice, an active reaction, rather than passive, and I walk the halls of the house, my belly simmering with something less than rage. The heft of cast iron in my hands feels right in a way my mother’s light Club aluminum does not.

I am angry at the urgency they feel in giving my mother six months of destructive chemotherapy but not being worried when her blood counts are too low to receive treatment. For what feels like her oncologist forgetting she’s a human being with a brain, with feelings, and this is something I will not ever forgive him for. We brush aside his poor bedside manner, as that’s just the way he is, and my fingers tingle with resentment. For the subtext of You have cancer and you’re getting chemo—what do you expect? For the nursing staff telling her, again, in voices that sound incredibly patronizing to my ear, If your temperature gets to 100.4, you have two hours to get to the ER; make sure you wash your hands; make sure you avoid sick people—or on her last visit, where her platelets were too low and her white blood cells were so scarce they could be individually counted, the nurse told her to be extra careful with shaving—and made motions with her hands like she was shaving her legs—and I could feel my brain seize. Look around you, nobody here has hair, my mother also clearly has no hair, and you’re telling her to be careful shaving her legs?

My mother’s friend A., recently diagnosed with lung cancer, sent an email where she reported with amused exasperation the frustrated and angry reaction of her son to not knowing more after her recent CT scan, and A. reminded him that she was pleased with the report, that she was—like my parents—perfectly happy to accept things as they come. Oh, my mother said to me when she read the email: There are two of you! My mother says she never felt patronized, or felt that she was treated poorly, but I felt it. Deeply. My father went so far this morning as to link such acceptance to maturity, Not, he hastily—but not hastily enough—added, not that you’re not mature. At other times, he’s suggested that perhaps I’m simply searching for somebody to be angry with. This might be true. I have the luxury of questioning these doctors when my parents do not. They need to trust that the oncologist knows exactly what he’s doing, because if they cannot trust him, the consequences are unfathomable. My middle sister is a nurse: we are a family that trusts our medical professionals. We trust people who have risen to the tops of their fields to know what they are doing, whether they be cabinetmakers or world-class doctors. That is the way we function.

Maybe it’s the job of children to bear emotion our mothers cannot voice. Maybe it’s a role reversal none of us are ready for, when the children feel they must step in front of danger, into the path of those who would take advantage. I don’t know where my distrust has come from—maybe the corporate takeover of education and medicine, the destruction of natural resources for the sake of profit, a political philosophy that calls business the savior of whatever ails you. We watch a pharmaceutical company jack the price of an AIDS drug or my nephew’s EpiPen simply because they can. Maybe I feel more strongly the outrage of my mother being told to use Glad Press’n Seal wrap when she puts lidocaine on her port before she leaves home for treatments, rather than the medical-grade Tegaderm she was originally given. Our mothers, using kitchen wrap for medical purposes. Maybe, as a cook, I should appreciate the ingenuity, but I don’t. I really don’t.