Hold your hands apart like you're deciding whether to buy a honeydew melon. That's how big my mom's kidney tumor got.
How does a woman walk around with a tumor the size of a young papaya sprouting from her kidney? Well, she doesn't do much walking, for one thing. She falls asleep when she sits, develops depression and anemia.
Here's the thing that has me scratching my head. Mom's been treated for diabetes for years, by the same doctor, and the same nurse practitioner. She's been seeing a chiropractor. She's been regular with a primary care physician. Where were these people for the past seven years while this gourd has been eating my mother alive?
This reminds me of the time mom almost lost her ten month old baby daughter (me)to gastroenteritis. She brought a fairly sick and fussy baby to the pediatrician and timidly asserted that the child didn't seem healthy. The doctor dismissed her worry as over-protective mothering and assured her that baby was fine, fine and would be a real tornado as soon as this little ague passed. It wasn't until said baby became dangerously dehydrated and had herself a seizure or two that the doctor admitted something was wrong.
Except that now, more than one selectively-deaf know-all has determined that a woman barely into her sixties who can't walk around the block, who envies hurricane victims who've been swept away to their deaths, who sleeps two-thirds of her life away, has nothing seriously wrong with her. She's fine, fine, as soon as they get the right blood sugar balance, as soon as they get the right anti-depressant, as soon as she stirs herself and gets more exercise, she'll be a real tornado.
No. No. No she won't just get better on her own if someone ignores her long enough. And by the way, she has a husband. Does he not watch? Does he not see? Does he not ask questions? For all his vaunted devotion to her and his marriage, he has a better eye for a modern repair to an antique framing plane than for his wife's health. This is the man who thinks that racing ahead of her is the way to motivate his wife to shake off her malaise. I wonder, did his back look like abandonment to mom? And did that make her ignore her own needs because she figured that it wasn't important?
What a useless round of "The Blame Game" that is, though. Cancer happens. If the oncologists knew why, I firmly believe they'd tell us how to stop it and turn to specializing in Geriatrics, knowing that more people would grow old in a cancer-free world.
But for now, I wish doctors would assume that a patient in New Jersey has cancer until proven otherwise. Things are more treatable that way. And I wish that doctors would listen to my mother. And I wish my father would pay attention to her, too.