10
I’m dreading her leaving before the plane even lands. I take pictures and label them last dinner, last gelato, last hug, like my daughter is dying instead of home from college for a short visit. There are awkward hellos from her two brothers. She kisses the dogs. I remember how much she misses them when she’s in the hospital. During her first seizure, her eyes went vacant as she faded away, like she was drowning on the beach, while I flailed in the sand for the lifeguard cart spinning by to stop, for 911, for anyone, god, to just help us. Later, her psychiatrist will call me when he can’t get ahold of her even though she’s logged in to their zoom session. All he can see is her string lights over her bed, like tiny halos of invisible angels.
9
The nurse dons what looks like a hazmat suit when it’s time for what the medical staff calls, almost reverently, the Red Devil. My mom and sister are here to witness this first desecration of my body. My cheeks are still blushed, my hair long. I still have my period, as far as I know, fertile. I laugh, trying to make the nurse comfortable as she plugs into my port, shoots me in my stomach with anti-nausea medication, and applies a bone marrow booster patch which will inject me two days later. When the chemotherapy starts its slow drip down the line, I have to look away as my sister grabs my hand like she can pull me to safety.
8
The pediatric ER doctor sends us home, saying, “If it was bacterial meningitis he’d be dead by now.” Three months later, my youngest son is still having symptoms not dissimilar to those my daughter had at the start of her life-altering illness. I take two Xanax then drive him to another specialist because his brain MRI showed something the neurologist said was abnormal. Even though I’m prepared with details of positive blood tests for infections and lowered immunity, the doctor says my son is fine. Old-school Jesus hangs on his office wall. When I get home I sleep for three hours. (I have half-joked for five years that doctors gave me PTSD by sticking to the easiest solution for themselves instead of the best treatment for my daughter. I realize that I have been doing what the doctors did to us, pretending that my pain was not real enough to be seen). Doctors have no faith. If they can’t see it, they don’t believe in it.
7
Like clockwork, twelve hours after the white cell booster patch injects into my arm, my bones create fire. I writhe within my sheets, a piece of paper alight. My bed is now a hell where demons tear me apart from the inside. The nurses say to pop a Claritin and it will reduce the pain, but this simple magic potion does not work on me. I grind my teeth in silent prayer for it to stop. Later, when I wake from mastectomy surgery and try to lift my arm I will cry a sharp alarm. When my sister helps remove my dressings for my first shower, I am shocked by my concave chest and cannot breathe. She soothes, “It’s okay. You’re okay,” like a blessing before a baptism.
6
During the birth of my first child, the doctor manually dilates my cervix. My son’s head is over one hundredth percentile. When his heartbeats slow, the nurses run in and yank the head of my bed down, then shave me in case an emergency c-section is needed. Instead, they vacuum him out of my body. The suction and my narrow passageway elongate his head like an alien. Later, my milk will run thin and I’ll fumble with my baby and my nipples while the woman who calls herself a lactation expert sits across from us with some guy who strolls into her office for a chat on his break.
5
There is a worldwide pandemic and I am in the ER. Millions of people have died from a virus. The hospitals are overrun with dying. I bring disinfectant wipes and scrub the bed rails. There is a no-visitor policy, and unless a nurse takes a moment to hold your hand, you die alone. The news keeps a running death ticker tape. This time it’s not my back or a child who’s brought me here. My reconstructed chest is red and oozing from a pinprick hole along the scar. After surgery, I wake up on the floor where rich people recover. There is real art on the walls and a second room with a wet bar. I am not wealthy. I ask the nurses if I have died and gone to heaven.
4
Shoji are translucent paper in wooden grids used as room dividers in Japanese architecture. These defuse the image on the opposite side, yet still let sound and light and shadow pass. People tend to speak calmer, move lighter. When waves of ghosts came following the tsunami in Ishinomaki, the living saw the dead wet on their doorstep or waving down taxis to take them home. They consider these visits a gift and their duty is to inform the souls of their death so they can move on. Townsfolk say death is like the shoji, it may be blurred but it is still present. Also, for me, the line between life and death has grown paper thin.
3
I search makeup tutorials for chemo patients to help me look alive. I am a ghost of myself who haunts my home. When CNN interviews me, I suggest they film me without my wig. A famous news anchor sits at my breakfast table then strolls along the sideline of my son’s soccer game, where I tell him that when you get sick you take stock of what’s really important. Later, Elton John’s “Sad Songs” will be playing when I wake after another colonoscopy. I expect a clear report, since only a few weeks prior the surgeon removed what we thought was the last of my cancer from my already excavated chest, but instead my gastroenterologist will say he found a nodule that looks like metastatic breast cancer in my colon.
2
When my youngest son is a baby, I enroll him in a mother’s morning out program at a church a couple days a week. He has just turned one and can’t walk yet. A woman old enough to be a grandmother is one of the caregivers and informs me he couldn’t stay awake the entire time when I pick him up. She makes it seem like a burden to hold him, an impossible situation without a solution, like it isn’t a two-hour program for babies with a room full of cribs across the hall. The next time I pick him up he has scratches down his arms. He’s crying, has been for awhile, trying to pull himself up to stand against the chain link fence in the dirt of the church playground. When I hold him to my chest, the woman, who has her arms crossed, chatting with the other caregivers, coldly says he’s dirty since he can’t walk. I will call the director crying. She will declare the easiest solution is to kick him out of the program. I wouldn’t have taken him back anyway, to a woman who would rather see a baby suffer than pick him up.
1
My second and third babies’ heads are smaller than their older brother and deliver quickly. For my daughter, we almost don’t make it to the hospital in time. She swallows some meconium in my womb and the nurses whisk her away to add up elevated white cell counts. My younger son has a knot in his umbilical cord. When the doctor pulls him out, she asks if she can hold it up for the medical students in the room, for there are always students trying to learn how to bring forth life, ward off death. The doctor says if the knot had been any tighter he wouldn’t have survived.
0
The doctors tell me I only have a few months to a few years to live, so our family goes on bucket list trips. In Iceland, my husband and I drift between continents while snorkeling. We splurge at the iconic Blue Lagoon on in-water massages where we lay on semi-submerged mats. The boys love it. My daughter and I are both uncomfortable being touched by a stranger in warm water that looks like mother’s milk. My masseuse instructs me to take my top off underneath the wet blanket and then we talk the entire time about my cancer. I don’t know why I can’t tell her I don’t want to talk about it in this place. I don’t know why I take my mastectomy bathing top off when I don’t want to. Instead, I continue to tell her on and on, still and stiff as she rubs my body, knowing I am doing this wrong, that I am not floating.
—
Source: Unsolved Mysteries, paranormal happenings after the earthquake and tsunami 2011 in Ishinomaki, Japan
