New Cancer Scare

Writing might be cathartic (except that catharsis is really for the audience, according to classical literature.) Oh, I do not know anymore - or care.

A band of angels - day is done - i will go so gently.

It all started almost two weeks ago when I had a terrible episode of vertigo, very reminiscent of what happened two months before the 2007 kidneycancerturnedbrain tumor bleed.

Doctors are concerned about a recurrence of kidneycancerturnedbrain tumor.
And so am I, since I am still dizzy and have headaches.

So - I am too weak to undergo brain surgery. So - what? Nothing. Just sit home and wait to bleed to death? All alone? What choice?

I see a new oncologist/hematologist on Weds. and  ENT on Tuesday. Cannot hear out of left ear. Mri not until a week from tomorrow. How last?

Ha ha. This has not been cathartic for me or anyone else. What to do?

Why Are (Some, Most) Nurses So Mean?

1.They hate the day shift.
2.They hate the night shift.
3.They know more than doctors.
4.They know less than doctors.
5.They have not walked in your hospital "booties."
6.They do not like to watch people die.
7.They hate the yellow plastic "ponchos" they have to don when caring for a person who has been quarantined.
8.They can't wait to get away from you so they can talk about you to other nurses.
9.They had fights with their spouses shorty before coming on duty.
10.They do not like the sound of the patient's buzzer.

Fun Facts As 2014 Draws to a Close

1.Comorbidities of kidney cancer are as bad as the cancer itself.
2.I am now in stage 3b of chronic kidney disease (ckd) by virtue of losing one kidney, getting older, and other factors. (There are only 5 stages. Who knew this could happen?}
3.I have had (and am told I no doubt again have) kidney stones.
4.These stones cannot be removed because one surgical error would lead straight to dialysis.
5.I have a large cyst in my kidney, which also cannot be removed. (See above.)
6.I have become supremely agoraphobic.
7.I need to have a thyroid nodule biopsied again because the latest doctor hit blood vessels and only drew blood.
8.I have leukemia probably from focused head radiation.
9.I have cataracts probably also from focused head radiation treatments.
10.Kidney stones hurt worse when they pass (well, maybe not worse) than childbirth.
11.You never recover from the shock and grief of losing EVERYTHING you ever owned, particularly your mind, in a hurricane that was probably a tsunami.
12.I have been in p/t  for a year trying to learn to walk after breaking a spinal cord bone.
13.I pray constantly that i might regain my faith.
14.The exhaustion of CKD stage 3 and lymphoma stage 1 are worse than cancer surgeries and ensuing comas.
15.Some of my best friends have deserted me, like birds from a tree.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Critique (please read "Older Post, "  entitled 2 Men, first)

How do we recover from childhood trauma when we are left to our own resources as adults? Can we ever recover and become whole? These are the questions Moser asks in her memoir glibly entitled 2 MEN. The answer that finally comes to her is that one must "begin to understand" the effects of a   monstrous past in order even to hope for some recovery, whether recovery is possible or not.  

The simple, flippant, almost childlike tone of her memoir is deceptive, for there is great hurt and significance behind each word, even  Dr.Seuss' words, so aptly included. She has not yet overcome the gibberish communicated to her  by parents who were caught in their own web of insane confusion. The brief lines contain years of struggle and heartache; the tone not only of detachment but also of simplicity are attempts to disguise great pain.

She tries to fight her past by falling in love with Robert, who, in the end, uses her much as he  has used her good friend; i.e., solely for his own needs. Behind the stoicism lurks a hard, intransigent selfishness and the familiar passion that causes, in the end, only pain.  We can assume that the first kiss occurs only when Robert decides it will. He has no apparent concern that he ruins her hopes for an engagement let alone her graduate plans in Boston. Robert comes back to her as he pleases and then leaves; he gives her little hope for reliability and absolutely no promise of support. The ritual washing of hands after the funeral is the only self-cleansing he can manage.

So Moser repeats her past. She never uses her name because abused children never have a chance to develop an identity. In the second part of the memoir, she recalls places of abuse - but except for the beatings, specifics of abuse are lost to her, as they are to many traumatized children. In her memories she is an onlooker; she is not a past participant in her father's activities. And what of the good memories that are so contradictory to the bad ones? The man who taught her to read also took away her life.

In the end the truth begins to come to her: It was her father and not Robert who had taught her about love. Yes her notions about love are self-defeating and self-immolating: so how can she attain the genuine, enduring love she thinks she desires?   She will roll her hopes uphill, but they will always crash back down and crush her. Does she even know - or have the self-respect - to care?

Can we believe her  when she says she "begin{s} to understand"? If so, is understanding enough? Can anyone ever really put "Humpty Dumpty" back together again? She already has delivered her own verdict. Her hope for recovery is there, but is recovery really possible? This is the monumental question that this simply-written, almost childlike memoir explores.

Ellen Moser

2 Men (please read "Newer Post," CRITIQUE, after you have read this.)

This is a memoir about Robert and the last time I saw him. It is also my memories of the man called father.

Man #1: Robert

Robert and I were at Columbia at the same time, but I met him at the beach near my home the summer before my junior and his senior year. He was my good friend's date; in order to produce a foursome they had provided me with a dullard. Robert held my friend's hand; I held sandals in my own hand to prevent the dullard from touching me.

By the end of the day Robert and I had fallen for each other. When the sun set over the Verrazano Bridge, I looked him in the eye and said, "Come back and see my bridge again."

Robert called me the next morning. He said simply,"You asked me to come back and see your bridge," and he did -  many times.

I did not start dating Robert until my friend had found a new young man. While she sat staring dreamily at  a shell she and her friend had found on a beach somewhere, I left a note in Robert's mailbox at his dorm inviting him to call me. In my mind, it was now okay.

And he called - many times over the coming years.

Our first kiss almost took place in Riverside Park late one crystalline winter night. I wore a spider web of a scarf on my head and desire in my eyes. Robert would later tell me that he had determined earlier that day not to kiss me on our first date. That was how he was: a stoic filled with emotion.

I was a virgin, but this was the late 60's. So pretty soon we were having sex. Let me not write about the mutual floods of emotion that seem even now to me incredible. Let me not write about the stealth of two otherwise honest people sneaking together around campus to avoid my friend, who kept wondering why Robert did not call anymore. Let me not write about the theaters, the ballets, the movies, the restaurants, his parents.... Nor anymore about the sex. (Just to repeat what Dorothy of THE GOLDEN GIRLS once said:"We named it.")

Then Robert graduated and went on to MIT. I was to follow and go to Tufts the next year. Did I really not notice how reluctant Robert had been to send me the Wheelock, the Leslie, the endless catalogues from colleges and universities in Boston and environs?

I visited him three times in Boston - via car, bus and train. He came home at Thanksgiving. When he had asked my finger size, I had expected a ring. I received instead a pair of sensible leather gloves.

Then came the call before Christmas to say that he was going skiing upstate. No, I could definitely not come along. I cried and begged; he said he did not want just to hang up on me; so I hung up first.

Robert came home at intersession about one year later. He came to see me. The kisses were as passionate as before; the look in his eyes was blank because he was no longer there. He had already met the young woman who would later become his wife.

We tried one more time. Robert walked down the street where I lived; I waited as still as stone on the front porch. My father had just fallen over the keys of his piano and died.

Later I took off my dress, and Robert said I was as beautiful as ever, but should not depend upon him for - anything. Then we went to sleep in separate rooms. He attended my father's funeral and burial. I cried on his shoulder on the way to the cemetery.  He returned to my home, washed his hands in the ritual cleansing water, and soon left. I was never to see him again.

But at that moment I thought: I had come to love through him.

Man #2: My Father

Will I write this? Dare I write this? Should I write this? And my mind continues its journey through my grandson's Dr. Seuss books, and I think: I will write it if I can.

My father (mi padre, mon pere), my dad: Brilliant, frustrated wholesale dress salesman, master chess player, lover of Beethoven, musical genius, poet, songwriter, self-tutored student of astronomy and all things celestial - innocent child molester who could not even fool his little baby girl.

Ha! I remember it all: in Helen's house on Mermaid Avenue, in our basement, in our garage, on a jetty in the sea at the deserted beach in early spring. The white handkerchief, the gleaming gold tooth as his impassioned face stared out into the ocean. My fear that I would fall in.

Like all good girls I told my mother, when I became old enough to talk; yes, I was believed and dragged to the pediatrician, who assured her there surely would be repercussions. Yes, she soon realized she had to protect her husband, her source of support, and branded me a liar. Then she became the one who held me down on my father's  lap so he could beat me and beat me and beat me for lying - and then toss me off  his lap and throw me on the floor. (But Daddy what about the times I would sit on your lap and you would teach me the names of the inky black letters on the front page of the NY Post? - but Daddy, but Daddy, but Daddy...).

I am 67 years old now. I have been with men, men, men. I have searched for - Robert? my father? Does it matter? Humpty Dumpty, as we all  know, could never be put back together again.

Reprise

Now I have returned to 1969. Robert is standing beside me at my father's open casket. He does not take my hand. I look at his stoic face. I look at my father's face. Finally I begin to cry.

They close the casket, say the fake words, some of them written by me.  We bury my father and go home.

Robert stays for a short time, and then leaves. I close the door behind him. For good.

A few days later I pick up a yellowing picture of my dad at his piano.

And then I begin to understand: I came to love through him.

Haiku, for Zach, 10/10/14

Seeing your perfect
face makes me cry. This my ode
to our Grecian urn.

What You Should Know Before Entering a Hospital

1.You will be subjected to all indignities for which your nurse has time.

2.You will be summoned for tests at all hours of the day and night.

3.You will never know the results of these tests.

4.You will soon want to eat a hot dog from Nathan's.

5.The gowns are open in the back. You will get used to mooning the whole place. Actually nobody cares.

6.You will very soon be very sorry that you entered the ER in the first place.

7.You will see a doctor for 3 seconds during early morning rounds - if you happen to be awake.

8.A hospital is a metropolis. Who belongs there and who does not?

9.Your discharge will remain a secret until the minute you walk out the door.

10.You will eventually react to all the meanness heaped upon you, whether you want to or not.

The Things She Wore

By now many of us know the unspeakable story of Cynthia Wachenheim Bacharach's  leap to death with her baby strapped to her chest. Since I used to know the family, I have read everything written abut Cynthia's suicide and have tried, totally unsuccessfully. to reach out to the family. My mind remains filled with Cindy even though we have passed her first yahrzeit, but for me there is one image in this story with which I have become most obsessed. So I must write about it and hope my blog will help at least one woman suffering from PPD.

There is a photo of Cynthia lying on the ground, lifeless, covered by a white  sheet. One can wonder many things: viz., how many back bones were broken; how long did they leave her there on the hard ground before they took her to the morgue, etc., etc.

But what struck me the most is that on he feet she wore a pair of men's socks. She was dressed in jeans, which were no doubt somewhat tattered at the cuffs.

Remember: Cindy was a successful lawyer. In former days she likely went to her closet and chose a designer suit to wear to work. What, however, is a relatively new stay-at-home mother to choose to wear on any day but nothing at all special; nothing at all to remind her of her identity as a successful attorney? (How ridiculous would she look sitting  on a park bench feeding the pigeons with her baby while she wore her newest and smartest Bloomie's suit?)

The point is this: Why does society demand that women give up their identities while staying home with  newborns? Why must we wear our husband's old socks and our most decrepit jeans? (I wore maternity pants that were falling off me for many months after my baby had been born.)

I do not know any answers. I only know that somehow society pays so much attention to babies and what they are doing, playing with,wearing, etc. that there is neither time nor inclination to give the stay-at-home mother any notion about what has become of her pre-baby self. In your memory,Cynthia, we must help other new mothers survive and prosper.

Obit: Bryant Wollman (1947-2008)

I want to say that I had a queer connection to Bryant, but that is hardly witty. But our relationship was odd, to say the least.

A talk with an old beloved classmate recently revealed that Bryant, as a kid, had had a fantasy of raping me. Now that is simultaneously odd and not odd at all. He tried: upstairs from his maverick father's medical office in Coney Island and in a fancy hotel room procured by his worried dad. We were very young. We were very virginal. He did not succeed, but I guess we were sequestered long enough to please his dad, who drove us home in the wee hours of the morning. (Actually we had been fighting about having/not having sex.)

Bryant was very sad during the time I knew him. His mother had died when he had been very young; his father remarried to attain help for raising the children, or perhaps out of love. Bryant disliked his stepmother and perpetually mourned for his own mother. (When he went off to college, he gave me a beautiful picture of her, presumably for safe-keeping,) Meanwhile. during Bryant's pre-college days. his father had taken a mistress.

Now this is a little odd because his father was not only a physician on Mermaid
Avenue but also a marriage counselor, a hypnotist, and a counselor for folks who were going to have transgender operations. Besides Bryant, the good doctor was one of the saddest people I have ever met. No matter: the four of us double dated, and I enjoyed the experience of being taken to fancy expensive places.

It all fell apart when we four were sitting in a theater in wonderful box seats, and Bryant started (and continued) knitting.  None of us knew what to do, but his father soon sent him off to BU, where he was to study pre-med. I went on to meet men who were certain of their sexuality, and Bryant dropped out of school and disappeared.

Somewhere along the passageway of time, I heard that Bryant had become a mailman in Half Moon Bay, California, where it seems he found a comfortable niche if not contentment.

Unfortunately he died from heart trouble. His heart had been broken so many times - by me too - that that was a logical course of death for him. Today I  am thinking that I love him - or his memory. I certainly loved the times we all spent together.

So.... Bryant, I am a little late to say my final goodbyes to you and your dad.  I hope you had a good enough life. I hope you brought others the happiness you often brought me. I really think you did.

A Nameless Tragedy

It happened on March 13. 2013, while I was still barely alive. I learned about this event, for which there are no appropriate words, from all of the newspaper articles archived in my computer. I had thought my own mourning was finally crawling to an end, but the news of Cynthia Wachenheim's death chilled my heart, mind and soul all over again.

Cynthia's uncle was the love of my life. I remember the day at Columbia, which we both attended, when he told me his sister had just given birth to a baby girl. My friend's native language was Spanish: he pronounced her name Cyntia, then decided Cindy would be a better choice for him. So Cindy it was.

My relationship with my friend had a sad ending that broke my heart and spirit. I was never the same again, but I went on to live a life, and gave little or no thought to Cindy, though her uncle remains indelibly etched into my very soul.

My friend went on to do exceptionally well, and apparently has a lovely successful wife and three brilliant sons. No wonder the newspapers noted that family members could not be contacted to comment upon Cindy's dearth.

On March 13. 2013, at about 3 in the afternoon, Cynthia put her baby in a snuggli-type pouch, strapped it to her chest, and jumped from a window in her 8th story apartment in New York City. At the last moment she flipped over, thereby saving her baby's life. She died instantly on contact with the cold, suicidal pavement.

All the papers wrote that Cindy had once walked out of a room for five minutes, leaving her baby unintended. During this time he fell and hit his head. There was no discernible injury, but Cindy feared baby Keston, named for his deceased grandfather, had sustained a terrible brain injury from that fall, which she blamed on herself. She believed Keston would have an insufferable life, and that she would be forevermore incapable of caring for him. All the doctors had told Cindy her baby's development was fine.

What are we to make of this? The majority of write-ups were mostly objective and even quasi-sympathetic not only to baby Keston but also to Cindy,but nobody found the right words, even though all the writers seemed to be trying to put this event into proper perspective. Maybe we are not such an uncaring community of human beings after all; on the other hand, maybe we are so inured to the reality and prevalence of mental illness that  sometimes manifests itself in unspeakable ways that we take aberrant behavior for granted. But - and this is an important but - Cindy came from a highly successful and stable family; she herself was a lawyer in NY, and most  likely had had no major mental illness previous to her suicide.

The obstetricians used to say that postpartum deprssion, or PPD, was a normal very short-lived non-event, but most of these doctors were men. PPD, as it turns out, is an insidious disorder, probably partially, at least, of hormonal origin. It can occur months after giving birth, after the initial euphoria and excitement of child rearing gives way to lonely hours of tending a newborn day and night. Just for starters, we all know the effects of sleep deprivation. PPD thrives on isolation: Cindy's mother is dead, and one needs an experienced mother to help keep a new mother (of 44) on track, if not sane.

I could go on and on. In summary, however, the real lesson learned from
Cindy's death is that the medical/psychotherapeutic community must learn more about and do a much better job of understanding  PPD  and the countless women who are right at this moment needlessly suffering. No, ssrri's and neuroleptics are not the whole answer for treating PPD.

And now I am more certain of what I believe: Yes, we are still a brutally uncaring civilization if we do not study this universal syndrome more carefully and realistically before more beautiful people like Cindy are driven to take their own lives, ironically, to protect their children. But that is a topic for more thought and more blogs.

Meanwhile may G-d , who understands all, cherish Cindy's soul and help us poor mortals become more compassionate, knowledgeable human beings.. May He heal Cindy's family and friends, particularly the very private. probably inexorably grief-stricken man who still is the love of my life.