Tumor-versary
And through all of it he was cheerful
This week is the anniversary of the diagnosis of Randy’s tumor. I don’t remember how many years it’s been—4? 5? But I’m back in that pit of pain and confusion. Sometimes I can’t believe he’s dead and other times it’s hard to believe he was ever here. And I’m back to sobbing, to regretting so much.
I’m ridiculously good in a crisis, so that night wasn’t so terrible. Randy woke up moaning, almost shouting, Oh my god, oh my god. And then, The smell, the smell, oh my god. And I stayed calm, I got him downstairs, spoke softly, got him into whatever clothes I could lay hands on, slippers, coat, and got him into the car. Off and on during the drive to the hospital he would begin again with Oh my god, the smell, oh my god. And I wasn’t afraid because I was 100% focused on getting him to the ER.
It was Covid times, of course, and no one wanted to let me in but he couldn’t answer any questions. They made me go to the regular entry and do something or other, but by the time I got back they had taken him out of the waiting room and back to the curtained cubicles.
I told the staff what had happened and ran down his health history, which no one cared about. At Kaiser no one cared about his lungs and at Stanford no one cared about anything BUT his lungs. One of my many regrets is that we didn’t insist on doing more with Stanford rather than straddling the bridge between the two, trying to keep things straight.
I don’t know what all they gave him, but he did stop the moaning. And then they had many questions. What’s your name? When’s your birthday? How many kids do you have? Who’s the president?
He remembered his name, but most of his other answers seemed like guesses. He didn’t remember Joe Biden’s name but said he could picture him in his mind. Which makes sense—he was a visual person, not a word person. He looked at me and beamed, saying, I don’t remember your name but I love you very much.
They admitted him, saying he’d had a seizure, and then began the long period of testing. They tested for so many things, but I think everyone knew it was a tumor. Randy came more or less back to himself but a variety of small tests like they perform on Alzheimer’s patients demonstrated that he was significantly impaired, and he couldn’t drive. He was very disappointed by that.
We heard about lesions on his brain and other words that weren’t cancer. Finally they did a biopsy and finally we heard the word cancer. We got various words for the tumor, that it could be grade 2, 3, or 4. We did hear that it was inoperable and incurable and a lot of “it depends” on life expectancy. I did some research, but what no one said was glioblastoma—which is what it was.
It’s confusing to look back—he got a miracle lung transplant that saved his life, but the drugs he took led to cancer, which killed him.