BRAIN TUMOR HUMOR
Brain tumor humor is something my family and I held close to our hearts. For someone like my mother with Stage 4 Glioblastoma brain cancer, that is the only thing you can do. There are no treatments to save her life, there is no magical potion to change what we were about to witness, but there was humor. I wanted to write this book from the beginning. The true beginning of my mother’s cancer narrative. It started in 2015.
We were on our way to Hawaii from New York. On the way to Hawaii, we decided to stop in Los Angeles, where my brother lived to visit him. On what was supposed to be a 5-day stop in Los Angeles, we visited the town of Slovang and further to Hearst Castle. It was much northern than Los Angeles, but it was well worth the trip. We went the day before, and the day of my mother’s birthday; July 4th. The drive up was truly when we started to see the signs. I had always bickered with my mother, and having to share a small rental car was just bait. Not to mention we both have quite wide set hips. I sat in the backseat of the car with her, it was 3 of us in this order; myself, my mother, my brother Eric. The whole ride up, I had constantly felt her taking up my space. She was in my precious space bubble! I needed that space to think and breathe and relax. Or so I thought… I definitely did not. I was just a bit selfish and wanted the space to relax and drive up.
Anyway, the whole ride up, our dialogue consisted of “Mom, get off me!” “I’m not on you” “Mom, yes you are!!”Finally, after hours of bickering we made it to Solvang and grabbed cups of coffee from the café. We got our coffees and raisin croissants, and sat at a table. This is when things just got weird. When my mother held her coffee, she said, “I feel as though I just had an out of body experience”. She said that she saw herself holding a cup of coffee but could not feel herself holding the coffee. She had to sit down and contemplate what had just happened. So did we.
“Mom I think you have a pinched nerve”, said my military brother Marc and my dad. They began to hit pressure points they believed were the culprits to why my mother could not feel her left limbs, but could see them.
“Mom I think you just need a wine tour”, said my other brother Eric, the resident of California and wine expert.
“Mom we need to see a doctor” I told her. Since I’m the youngest, I usually have to repeat annoyingly a billion times to get my point across, but she heard it loud and clear the first time I said it.
“I am not going to a doctor yet. Let me get through my birthday and I will go” she commanded to us. Her birthday was the next day, and so that is what we did. That was not the only term of agreement. “I am seeing a doctor at UCLA, I am not going to an urgicare up here”.
Deal. She was seeing a doctor. So we celebrated her birthday and went to Hearst castle. At the castle we had taken a group photo of all of us holding coffee, something our family began doing in every photo. There was a sense of peace in this photo. A sense of ‘Things are okay right now’. That night, we passed through the streets of kids holding sparklers to celebrate the 4th of July. It was so peaceful. We went to a steakhouse and ended the night. Quite honestly, I cannot even tell you what I ordered. It’s funny because I feel that we focus on what we’re eating, or what the time is, or what we say, but in reality, it doesn’t matter when looking back. I cannot remember any of that. I remember how we felt, and we felt at peace. It doesn’t matter. What mattered was that moment no one could take away from us. What mattered is we had no idea that in 24 hours our lives were about to change forever.
We drove back from Hearst castle, and the drive back was just quiet. It was quiet mostly as there were so many mixed emotions in the car, all while lacking the ability to address the elephant in the room. Something was up, but we didn’t know what. Maybe she did. Some of the car thought it was just a pinched nerve that needed to be “un-pinched”, the other part of the car thought my mom needed to relax, and the third part of the car thought she needed to go to the ER. Either way, the car had no idea what was happening or why, but all knew what we wanted was an answer for whatever was going on.
We arrived back in Los Angeles, and went straight to UCLA.
* Note to everyone: download games on your phone, or else you will end up like me and stuck in an ER waiting room with just one app on my phone that came with the phone. I never thought I would become an expert at unblocking little blocks in a puzzle to release a small red one through a hole, but here we are.
When we got into the UCLA ER, my dad was the only one to go in with my mother, and my brothers and I waited. Hour one went by, which turned to two, to then four. By hour four, my dad texted us to tell us to go and have dinner. It’s funny because you would think when something like this was happening and no one had any idea, we wouldn’t be hungry. It was the opposite. We were starving. My brothers and I went to get pizza, and it was so strange because this was probably the first time my brothers and I had just gone for dinner, just the 3 of us. It was weird because that is such a special moment, but something so terrible made it happen. I started to learn, especially with cancer, this is a theme. Something bad brings good people together. Once we had finished food, and jaywalked (which we learned was illegal in LA) we returned back to the hospital. My father was still in the ER with my mom. Quite frankly, I could not even tell you what time it was at this point. But it was late… like drunk sorority girls throwing up in the ER late. My dad had texted us to go to the hotel and get some sleep. This had to be the first time in my life I shared a bed with my brother and my other brother, with our dad. Time passed, and we all fell asleep. In the middle of the night, my dad entered and woke us up, “Kids. Your mother has a Brain Tumor”.
Writing about my story becomes hard because after that because all I heard was the peanut cartoons going ‘womp’ ‘womp’ ‘womp’. Brain Tumor. That’s all I heard. I went back to bed, and assumed it had been just a dream. It wasn’t. It was a nightmare that had just begun called my life.
