Nano Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Prognosis

     It was only three months earlier that Mrs. Hollins began her chemotherapy treatments. In this case the results were more damaging than the actual disease. Roger loved his wife and would have stood by her side no matter what her decision was. He didn't remember anybody telling her yes or no to the treatments, save the doctor, who seemed disinterested in all aspects of the care of his patient. Roger Hollins spent more than a minute that summer wondering why he was an oncologist in the first place. But he was not one to hold a resentment. Roger Hollins was, if not a take it easy kind of guy, at least a take it as it comes type personality.

     If people were to describe him it would be about his eyes, first and foremost. They were an intense sort of green, deep and bright although in certain light they became a cross between charcoal and gray. The eyes were what people noted about Mr. Roger Hollins, and they were eyes that tended to be passed down to his children, as well as the peculiar family nose and the way that the toes turned inward when any body from the Hollins family gene pool walked. Some people would possibly say that they noticed the smile first but in all honesty that smile generated from the eyes first anyway. When you got to know Mr. Roger Hollins, however, you quickly ascertained that he was first and foremost a balanced person; a man whom was not disagreeable simply because you did not want to disagree with him. You shook his hand and there was an immediate bonding between the two of you and a forge of trust established. So this man, although often upset at Dr. Jumari, an Indian born oncologist in charge of his wife's care, it would not sit there and ferment into a true anger. And rather than be pushed around or walked over by the doctor due to some inability to communicate his needs, Dr. Jumari often would find himself back to talk to The Hollins patriarch, taking time to be pleasant and well versed in the particulars of Mrs. Hollins condition.

     By the time that Roger Hollins saw the tumor attached to the liver through an ultrasound scan, the entire family had been notified. Tough as it was to admit to people, it was done nevertheless as rapidly as possible. With children across the states, even one outside of its borders, brothers and sisters and in laws running the gambit from stockbroker to midnight drug trafficker and back again to international design specialist, word spread quicker than you could imagine and before you could say “six months to a year” there was a big family reunion being organized and attended in Northern Florida.

     “Six months to a year.” is what the doctor told them. Fifty two years of a life together and the bottom line came down to that. “of course, you have to understand that there would be no quality to life that way” the good doctor had continued.

     “But it will get the cancer? Won't it?”

     “I'm sorry.” and everybody understands what that means when you hear it from a doctor. And when he continued with “It's all in God's hands now” you know you are in trouble because rarely is there a doctor who strongly believes that. So Mrs. Hollins decided to extend her life by a few months. Mrs. Hollins is a fighter no matter the odds or the expectations. Outsiders who knew what was happening tried their best to not seem like vultures. Friends came out of the woodwork to say goodbye. Not a single person who offered a prayer thought that they would cure Mrs. Hollins but that never stopped them from trying. The family understood, however. Cancer runs in stages and it grabs in bunches. Every one of the Hollins family members had been on the other side of this disease offering hope to the hopeless and comfort to those who needed it yet understood how to receive it even less than one knew how to offer it.

     One of the best things Mr. Hollins heard came over the phone from an old neighbor. “Life is nothing if not fatal.” The bluntness was the perfect amount of honesty to make the sentiment genuine. He loved Mary Hollins no less than the other hundreds of people praying and crying and offering to their gods anything they could, if not for a few more moments than at least for a sense of peace and comfort. Those prayers more than anything helped Roger to cope with the impending loss of his wife, and those thoughts in particular carried Mary Hollins through the end stages of her disease with the conviction of leaving her family in peace. That is not to imply that she hid her feelings or her pain. On the contrary it merely helped her adjust to them, to account for them. If anything Mary Hollins owned her pains and her discomforts as if she had bought them new a generation ago and recently spent the weekend cleaning them up for display in the china cabinet.

     And with the Spring equinox a week behind them the Hollins family took their turn in the barrel, as it were, and went through with the chemotherapy. The wait time, the testing rounds and the third degree from the insurance companies all took longer than the chemo treatments. The kids who had held out hope that the chemo would cure their mother went crazy with the waiting game, thinking if they would only start they could fight the cells. And the children who understood the hopelessness of that thought but held on to the idea that chemo would help alleviate the pain went nuts staving off thoughts of “more treatments. Now.”

     All the while the doctor asking her “Is this really what you want?” The hospital time and the recovery trials and the downtime and exhaustion coming her way and the mother of the family, the bread toaster if not the bread winner of the family, stated yes, she wanted this. She was ready to fight the cancer. Of course we know how this story ends already. But it was a scary period of time, for her husband Roger as well as the children. And Richard came home from St. Paul and Jessica came back from Peru (but left again for Cancun to return yet once more before setting off to Europe with her church) and James taking the drive every week from the hills of Tennessee. The chemo not only wiped her out it put her in the hospital. The diabetes thrived from the chemo while the immune system suffered. There was a stroke. There was angina, and three separate week long stays at the hospital and before you knew it the two bonus months everyone planned on from the therapy had been used up and Mrs. Hollins was just now starting to move out of the recliner and just barely holding down food and it was time once again to contemplate a second round of chemo and everyone looked at the other and thought that was only one round?

     This was the month of tears. This was the month where you were glad that everyone came out before the treatment started because now you knew, and now you understood that this was the beginning of the end or maybe even the middle of the end. And in early summer there were three cousins and two surviving aunts and the brothers and sisters and even a couple of in laws parading through the house and twelve people, all of them over sixty, laughing and jumping on the bed until the box spring sprung and the group toppled onto the carpet. And in July it was now the family and it was more intimate and there was the sole grandchild, a child of eleven who knew what death meant but was still unable to process it, unable or unwilling to let any feelings through other than how it affected his day and his ability to do things if he spent all his time here.

     But even that was good, because when Gramama shaved her head and there was fuzz on her dome her grandchild came over to rub it with a hint of shock and a mouthful of smile. And when the cribbage championships were occurring at the dining room table little Joey was there beside his grandmother playing online games with his laptop and explaining the rules to her. And that was how June was spent and July, as was stated, was spent in the hospital and in real fear of real death from the chemo, and now into August it finally calmed down and the family closed in tighter together and they were always there together, it seemed, and except for the acquired wrinkles it was not so much different than the household thirty years earlier when the oldest was just getting out of high school. And as the prayers came in and there were no signs of pain in their mom's liver the children quietly wondered if god had heard them, and they secretly prayed harder than ever. At least James did. Little Jimmy, now grown up and responsible for more than himself, who did believe in a god but still unable to comprehend why he would be listening, began to pray more frequently, not to have his mother gone but at least to ease her pain. And it seemed to be working and it seemed she was fine.

     Except for the appetite and he felt he could blame the diabetes for that. Otherwise she almost seemed fine and even Richard, the cynical one, and the, dare we say it, selfish one, the one who felt affected by his mother's death not through love but through a disruption of his plans. At least it seemed to be that way to others in the family. And August was a quiet month and a hopeful month and maybe the family thought she might get better and maybe we can do another round of chemo, but they also understood the reality, and they also were grateful for their time together, and so much so that young Jessica got called again to be of service and little Jimmy went back to his priorities, his vacation being saved for the bad days, those days in the near future when she would need more steady care.

     And the new rounds of chemo were turned down, and most of the family members were thankful and at least now we all knew what was to come, some day in the future and the month went on as expected and it was not until August turned to September when the family finally figured out about what hospice was about and the gratitude they felt and expressed to those nurses was tremendous. Rosario came and helped walk her around and did exercises for her hands and made Mrs. Hollins feel human again. And Nancy came by with the hospital bed and the medications and the living will, of course and was a life saver to the father for all he was trying to learn and to manage. And Chris came by to bathe and to shower her. “Yeah, he's a guy” Mrs. Hollins had told her son over the phone, “But he's super gay, so it's okay.” and the son wondering how exactly one became “super” gay.

     To say it was the happy month would certainly be misleading. But there was tremendous joy for the family, the wit of the family matriarch outshining the horror of the disease, and there was not a moment you could recall that was far removed from a joke or a friendly flip if the middle finger. In all honesty there was a large amount of freedom for the family as the month turned over and fall quickly approached, and if they imagined running in a meadow on a clear day, perhaps you could not blame them. They all knew the reality and when one chooses to obscure it, only slightly, through a tinted rose monocle rather than a layer of depressive dust, who can be the one to deny them.

     And in another two weeks it was over, of course. The call came on a Wednesday and trips were made in haste and planes were waited on and the family barely had time to enjoy that last week and wasn't it only a day ago that she was diagnosed? And there was the slightest of pain involved, which everybody found comforting. And there would never have been enough time or enough warning and no matter how much you wanted to tell yourself that one more day was all you needed, you knew it was horse crap and a thousand more days would have been fine and dandy as well. And in a week it would have been her seventieth birthday party and after the holidays was the fiftieth anniversary of her wedding and regardless of how the neighbors cried and no matter what the children thought they felt, there was nobody in the world who would ever understood what Roger Hollins, husband to the late Mrs. Mary December Hollins, nee Parker, had lost.