Meant To Meet

I’ve had people tell me more and more lately that maybe they were meant to meet me.

Once was last July at the sentencing of Dr. Farid Fata, the Michigan oncologist now in federal prison after diagnosing and treating people who never had cancer or would never benefit from it, all so he could line his pockets.

One former patient at the proceedings tearfully told me how she was struggling to accept what this doctor had done and how guilty she felt letting it happen to her. I told her my story, how even my father, a doctor, and I, an extremely well versed and vigilant caregiver, were duped. That gave her something, a modicum of peace that she was not to blame. It was what she needed to hear. She said maybe I was why she had come this day, to meet me, to hear this.

It happened again last night. I was at the mall to fix my broken phone and a woman with two teen daughters was sitting next to me. The help desk was crowded. She’d been waiting over an hour already. So we began to chat.

Somehow I learned her father was in the hospital. I realized it might be too personal but I asked gently if he was having surgery or something was more serious? He has cancer. Lung cancer. Stage four. It’s gone to his brain. They discovered it when he went to his doctor for some dizzy spells.

I told her I was sorry. I told her I understood. She asked about my story, which is not easy to share in few sentences, so I did my best to tell her what would help her. I told her about my father’s cancer, my father’s overtreatment by Dr. Fata, my mother’s unrelated but simultaneous health issues that kept me running between them and their hospitalizations and appointments for about three years.

She seemed to want to soak up what I said. She related. Her mother has health issues and she’s now worried about her. She said they are transferring her father to a better hospital, that he’s already starting radiation to see if they can shrink the tumors in his brain. It sounded grim.

And then our names came up for service and we sat beside each other, our banter now about technology.

When she was ready to go, she thanked me and said: “I think I was supposed to meet you.”

Before she left, maybe because she said that to me, I wanted to offer her a few things I learned, and wish I’d known sooner, about caring for your parents, dealing with terminal illnesses, responding to those we love with love when they are sick.

I said be there for your father and don’t assume aggressive chemo is the answer if he’s so sick and not for sure getting better. I said stage four is terminal, not to be negative but it’s something you need to know. I said to look into palliative care early, and that may entail the scary word hospice, but try not to let it scare you. 

She understood, she said. Let him live with what strength he has, not with poisons pumping into his body if all he has is a certain amount of time. Yes.

Be kind and loving, I told her. She said he’s been a bit mean, mostly to her mom. I said don’t take it personally. Never take it personally. He’s angry at himself, his body, his weakness. And he’s scared. And he is taking it out on those closest to him. Find peace knowing it’s not about you.

Be his advocate, go to his appointments, I said. He needs someone who can think straight because he won’t be able to. 

And live very presently. In the moment. Because the moments will soon be gone, for all of us someday. Just be there for him and with him. Be his daughter. He'll need his daughter.

And I offered her something I learned recently from a man whose wife had stage four breast cancer. Their fear of the future could overwhelm them but their wise doctor would say: “No one is dying today.” I loved that. I told her to remember that. And why it’s important to live one day at a time.

Her eyes welled up with tears and I wondered, did I say too much? But I knew I told her these hard truths in kindness and she'd listened. She hugged me as she left and I wished her luck.

I don’t know if I was there for her to meet me. I’m not sure I believe in that.

What I do believe is that most people around us are connections just waiting to happen. I talk to others and they open up to me. Maybe because I’m kind. Maybe because I’m compassionate. Maybe because I like to connect. This happens to me often.

I think we are all just a few words or questions away from connecting and learning from each other in ways that can make life a little easier, a little more bearable.

I hope I helped this woman, whose name I never got. 

Was I meant to be there for her? Maybe I'm the one who needed to meet her.

I don’t know. But I’m thankful we connected.

On Being There

 
I spent last Thanksgiving with my father in his hospital room, where I’d been with him day and night for nearly two weeks. My father had decided he no longer wanted to live. It was understandable.

We were both deep in grief over the loss of my mother just two months earlier. She, like him, had been in and out of the hospital over the previous few years, struggling with one serious health challenge after another. Her last hospitalization, which resulted in an emergency surgery she never recovered from, ended in an ICU, my hand holding hers as she lost her battle with a blood infection.

It was a horrible struggle for me to let my father go so soon after losing my mother. Yet I had to remind myself that he’d probably have let go sooner had it not been for her, his wife of more than 56 years.

After breaking his hip then discovering he had metastatic cancer, he’d grown to detest the dialysis he’d been on for five years. I reminded myself of the days I had to send my mother in to convince him to dialyze, to stay alive. “Do it for me,” she’d say. “I want you to outlive me.”

And so he did. And then he was done.

He told me he loved me dearly, that it wasn’t that he wanted to die, but he didn’t want to live “like this,” on dialysis, no longer strong and independent as he’d always been.

I didn’t get to hold my father’s hand as I held my mother’s. He passed away early that Saturday morning after Thanksgiving as I slept a few feet away.

But I was there. And for that, I am grateful.

I was there. And I’d been there.

I was there for my parents for three years, as one health challenge after another befell them until one day I realized I was their caregiver. I was in charge of their doctors’ appointments and home care, scheduling X-rays, chemo and physical therapy. I could recite their complicated medical histories without notes and go over their long lists of medications by brand name or generic. I even ran my father’s dialysis for him, which he did at home. Beyond that, I was managing their bills, grocery shopping, and feeding the cats.

Many days I was overwhelmed — sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally — but never spiritually.

As often as my heart broke for my parents, and sometimes for myself, I was also, and increasingly so, grateful for so many things. I feel that still. Maybe more so.

Thank God I could be there for them. Thank God I had my health and abundant energy. Thank God I had a good mind to understand their medical issues so well I was often assumed to be a medical professional. I was a good advocate.

More, I was a good daughter. I was told that often. Maybe too often.
I learned I was rare. We live in times when it’s difficult for children to care for their aging parents, to allow their parents to stay in their own homes, cared for and surrounded by those they love.

Not everyone can afford to cut back on a career or even put one on hold to care for their parents, or to move in with them, or to uproot their own family from the other side of the country. Not everyone is emotionally equipped to handle caregiving.

But for whatever reason, I could do that for them. And I know how much they appreciated me. I’m so grateful for that.

As I shared at my father’s memorial, I gave my parents a gift of myself those years, but it was also a gift to myself.


This first appeared on The Good Men Project, Nov. 28, 2013.

A Month of Thankfulness: On Being There

Thanksgiving has new meaning for me. 

I'm glad I could be with my father last year.

Please click on the link: 

http://goodmenproject.com/one-month-of-thankfulness/a-month-of-thankfulness-on-being-there-hesaid/

Pedestals

I had a bit of an epiphany the other night.

I was crouched down hooking up lines on my dad’s home hemodialysis machine to make a batch of solution for his next day’s therapy, a nearly four-hour process I have been assisting him with every other day for more than two years.

The thing is, he usually does that particular part himself. I’m usually — or “should be” — home or socializing or doing something “fun.”

I guess.

I mean, isn’t that what most people are doing? Spending their Friday nights dressed up, looking fashionable, or at least relaxing with friends or family.

Whatever.

Not doing this.

So I was feeling a little sorry for myself, because let’s face it, the past two months have been unusually challenging.

My father broke his hip in mid-November, which had me running back and forth between checking on my mom and visiting him during his nearly three weeks in the hospital. When he came home, he couldn’t be alone or take the stairs in their two-story house so I have essentially moved in with him in the condo where he does his dialysis. I’ve helped with everything from pulling on and off these outrageously tight orthopedic socks morning and night to grocery shopping and drug store runs.

Just about the time we felt my dad was okay to be alone overnight, my mother, who’d been staying in their home with the animals, suddenly was feeling sick. On New Year’s Day I took her to the local ER. It wasn’t terribly clear what her problem was, other than signs of infection and a pain that moved around in her abdomen from one day to the next.

A week later my mother had both her gall bladder and appendix removed. For the next two weeks, she had one thing or another — from an incision that wouldn’t heal properly to chest pains that resulted in one test after another to ensure it was due to heartburn and not her heart.

It was nearly three weeks before she was discharged, so weak now she too could not be home alone.

So here we are, three of us, in my dad’s dialysis condo, me pulling socks on and off, helping my mother with her medications while encouraging her to do what’s necessary to regain her strength. Oh, yes, and now running to their home daily to retrieve mail, feed and water three indoor cats plus several she’s given refuge to outdoors. There is the dog, too, now also at the condo so I can let her out morning and night.

Somehow in the midst of this, I actually find time to do my work but not much else.

So there I was on a Friday night, not in the latest fashions or hairstyle but in the same uniform of jeans and a dark shirt, hair in a ponytail. Far from sitting in some trendy restaurant, I was sitting on my heels hooking up surgical tubing.

And then it hit me.

Sure, this kind of sucks. But I am doing something terribly significant. And not saying no to it or avoiding it.

I looked at myself as someone else might and thought, Wow. She’s awesome.

Here I was putting all these people I imagined were doing what I thought I should be doing — living the good life, looking like some image in a magazine — on a kind of pedestal.

Not that my family is living the good life right now. It is what it is. But I’m doing what I need to do, putting that first.

And in that, I realized I’m the one I should be putting on that pedestal. Along with so many others who do what is necessary rather than what is fun.

We just might not look like it at first.