FRESH YARN presents: Something of Her Very Own ... by Annabelle Gurwitch

FRESH YARN presents:

Something of Her Very Own
By Annabelle Gurwitch

How I came to volunteer remains unclear to me. I remember offering to spend that first night with her in the hospital. It's the why that's a mystery.

She had spent a good deal of my childhood "resting." I spent my adolescence resenting her passivity and abdication of responsibility, and had mostly reduced our contact to brief phone exchanges.

So it's no wonder that when my father called to inform me that my mother, Shirley, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, I thought, good for her, she's finally got something to call her very own. I imagined the tumor a tight little ball of anger wadded up right on the edge of her consciousness.

The tumor had been discovered by chance on an x-ray of a stiff neck, following a minor car accident. There was no way of knowing if this thing, this growth, was a.) benign or malignant, and b.) stable or spreading like a fungus. No, the tumor had to go.

Overnight, my sister Lisa, the overachiever, became an expert on brain tumors. Within two weeks she and her children were marching in a National Brain Tumor Awareness fundraiser.

My mother was never more vital and energized than when facing her own mortality. She was instantly in communication with people with astrocytomas and subependymonas, asking them to leave information at her email address: ShirleysTumor@aol.com.

My father had his own method of coping. An entrepreneur of sorts, my dad has spent his life "putting business resources together." There was the art gallery, the travel agency, insurance sales, the door factory and the fast food restaurant featuring a foot-long french fry. Have you ever seen a foot-long french fry? Neither has anyone else. He purchased Grand Union Station in St. Louis, coal mines, silver mines, and had a foray into the film business. Have you ever seen Poor White Trash (Parts I and II), subtitled: Scum of the Earth? Neither has anyone else. In keeping with this tradition, he approached my mother's tumor basically like any other start-up: delegating responsibilities to others, seeing himself as the point man. He had mapped out a plan by which my sister and I would coordinate our flights down to Miami, where we would take care of our mother.

At the time, I had not set foot in my parents' home for several years. Utilizing insurance monies received for injuries incurred when a massage table had mysteriously collapsed beneath my dad, my parents had been renovating their house, and had blown the entire one-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement on improvements to the master bathroom, leaving the rest of the house fairly uninhabitable. It's really some bathroom, a monument to chrome and marble, and that's useful because you want to have a nice place to shower off the dust from the exposed beams in the unfinished bedrooms.

My sister and I arrived the night before the surgery and found my mother full of manic energy. Who was this mom, this frenetic mom? I sort of liked this mom. Mom toiled until dawn divvying up her worldly goods, because, "you never know." I listened to her with the realization that her very last words to me might be, "this gravy boat belonged to your grandmother."

A few hours later, my mother was whisked away to a pre-op room. She was amazing. When we saw her she was hooked up to IVs, and was calmly needlepointing an animal pattern pillow.

As my sister and father managed a semblance of normalcy, praising her handiwork, another patient was throwing up behind a curtain next to her, so a constant heaving sound punctuated their conversation. I started to faint and was removed from the room because my presence was disturbing to the other patients. Clearly my coming was a mistake.

On TV, people awaiting news of their loved ones sit in hallways, allowing for long dramatic tracking shots. In real life, my family and I were shuffled off to a cramped, airless, plasticky holding area and offered cheap pastries and instant coffee.

Every half an hour I went for a walk, first heading over to the cafe con leche stand where coffee after coffee failed to penetrate the fog that had descended over my person. Then I walked the hospital grounds.

If you're looking for glamour, you won't find it at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Located in the inner city, Jackson serves Miami's indigent population and it's no secret. Sitting outside on the curb were patients ravaged by AIDS and other afflictions. Most looked to be junkies, crime victims and/or perpetrators. An unspeakably peaked-looking shoeless fellow wrapped with bandages in a degraded state, approached me. I gave him a dollar and wished him a speedy recovery. It later occurred to me that he might not even have been a patient.

Local color aside, the doctors at Jackson, what with the prevalence of gunshot wounds to the head, have had plenty of opportunity to perfect cranial operating techniques, so it's really a great place to go should you need to get your head sawed open to remove a bullet and/or tumor.

Without fail, returning to the waiting area, it was as if time had stopped. My sister was engrossed in yet more brain tumor literature, and for the entire duration of my mother's surgery, my father sat with a cellular phone glued to his ear, negotiating business deals.

Five hours into the wait, I sought refuge in the hospital chapel, conveniently located adjacent to the waiting room. It claimed to be nondenominational, but Jesuses in various states populated the walls. Jesus on the cross; Jesus carrying the cross; Jesus lying down; Jesus sitting up, Jesus pushing an IV pole -- well, maybe the coffee was having an effect after all.

Moral questions hadn't arisen; really more like logistical ones plagued me. Where does the soul reside? In the body or the brain? Is the soul part of the self? And doesn't the self consist of memory, wit, learned knowledge, existing as grooves worn into the brain matter? And if that is true, then what? Is the soul flash frozen and then reconstituted later, like… Tang? Or does the soul leave during brain surgery, go out for a cup of coffee say, and then return if, and hopefully when, summoned back? What? I imagine a sort of holding area for souls, not unlike the D.M.V. My mother, in her surgical gown, needlepointing, waiting for her number to be called.

My dad and sister had voiced concern about the possible negative side effects of brain surgery. Memory loss, physical handicap, speech impairment. I wondered if instead, this surgery might improve my mother. Perhaps this tumor was the cause of my mother's inertia. I had always suspected her brain was like a gas stove whose pilot light had gone out; or not unlike a clogged drain, her brain, once freed from this obstruction, would be revitalized. Why there'd be no stopping her.

After seven hours, Dr. Heros entered the room. Yes, Dr. Heros, pronounced "heroes." Uh-huh, if you heard that in a movie you wouldn't believe it. We formed a circle around him. We spoke in hushed tones, nodded heads, he touched my arm, and when he left I turned to my sister and said, "I can't remember a single thing he just said." Luckily, Lisa had gleaned that my mother's tumor had been completely removed, plucked as it were, like picking a daisy. Tests would be performed later to determine if the tissue was cancerous. They were now ready to close her up. I had been so nervous, the only detail I was able to focus on were his long thin steady hands that had just been inside my mother's head.

Two hours later, we watched through glass as her inert body was wheeled into the intensive care recovery. I watched as they hooked her up next to other patients seemingly in equally or more dire condition. My mom was the only patient at the Jackson Memorial Hospital ICU that day without a police escort.

Soon we were led in to see my mother. It was inconceivable that only a few hours earlier her head had opened up, and here she was giving us two thumbs up when we told her the operation had been a success. As we sat with her, Seinfeld came on the TV in the ICU. It was an episode in which I had guest starred. In this episode, my character falls into a coma. There's my image, stretched out prone in a hospital bed, lying in virtually the same position as my mother.

The next day, it was as if she had fallen off the face of the earth. We found her alone in a room hooked up to machines. We stayed with her all day and observed as the occasional nurse... sauntered is the only word I can use to describe it, in and out of her room, on a schedule that was truly puzzling. Sometimes they came when you buzzed them; sometimes they were on a break and they were not to be disturbed. One uttered under her breath, "This ain't the Ritz, Honey," when I insisted that she look in on my mother because her IV -- her only source of nourishment, painkillers, fluids -- had run dry an hour earlier!

My family decided that someone should spend the night with Mom in her hospital room, lest reruns of Melrose Place should prevent the nurses from answering an emergency.

A rabbi once told me that you don't need to believe in the prayers, or even know what they mean. The mere act of reciting them brings you closer to God. Maybe it's the same thing with love. Maybe that's why I heard myself say, "I'll stay with Mom tonight."

Maybe, I just saw it as a chance to exercise control over her. Now she was all mine. But instead of venting all my pent-up disappointments and frustrations, what came out was: "Would you like your teeth brushed?"

"Uhmmm."

"Do you have to go to the bathroom?"

"Nnnn..."

"Are you in pain, mom?"

"Uhh..."

"Let me comb your hair, you know, I read a study that said that when women put lipstick on they don't suffer from as much depression."

"Mmmnn..."

I tended to her little needs until she fell asleep.

When that nurse said it wasn't the Ritz, she wasn't kidding. Uproarious laughter was how my request for a cot was greeted. One nurse took pity on me and procured a gym mat and a sheet, which I placed on the floor next to my mother's bed. At 2 AM, the night nurse looked in, took pity on me, and admonishingly said, "Get up, we never clean the floors, you'll catch something." She returned wielding an ancient wheelchair, which reclined just enough for me to collapse into. I fell into a twisted sleep, the last image that of my mother's sagging behind peeking out of the back of the hospital gown as she lay on her side.

In the morning, we began a regimen of walking the corridors. A really enterprising person would secure the right to advertise on hospital walls because they get a lot of foot traffic. We passed the other brain tumor patients on our way around with each rotation. Each had one clean slice of hair shaved off an otherwise untouched hairstyle, bandage covering the tumorous area -- an eye here, an ear there. My mom was sporting a kind of mohawk, one razor width sheared right up the middle of her head. Every patient on the arm of a father, mother, spouse, or offspring. Who were these people? Each one so lovingly tended to, totally absorbed in the acting of walking a few steps. We attendants, we nodded to each other as we passed, smiled encouragements to each other, little murmurs of acknowledgements. But who were they? I'll never know. I never talked to any of them, for the three days my mom was in that ward. There just wasn't any room for someone else's story.

"Does she seem any different?"

"No, no, she seems fine," I said when my sister came to relieve me. "In fact, she seems exactly the same."

"The tumor was benign," Lisa said. With the knowledge that my mother would live, I collapsed into a deep sleep on one of the army cots my father had rented for my sister and myself.

In movies, the mother dies. The mother passes on, knowing she was loved. The daughter learns compassion and becomes a better person.

In real life, my mother made a remarkable recovery. The energy of the crisis passed and a lassitude once again enveloped her.

Now, several years later, my overachieving sister and her family are marching for diseases we don't yet have. My father, at last glimpse, cell phone glued to his ear, was negotiating a settlement for some inscrutable business deal. My mother and I drifted into our usual pattern -- she, back to her lunch dates and me with my hurried phone calls. There is, however, a small but rather expertly stitched, lovingly rendered, animal print needlepoint pillow resting on my bed.