Author: sehaldorson

I write narrative nonfiction/lyrical memoir. I'm the mother of a special needs child and the wife of a cancer survivor, and I work in publishing.

Cosmogony

~ sehaldorson ~ 2 Comments

To see him lying there, bloated and nearly naked due to feverishness, tubes like exterior veins protruding out of his neck in a knot of grotesque jewelry, a patch of dark blood–had it gushed?–spread out and dried on his chest, a thrum thrust through my torso like when a plane breaks the sound barrier. He turned to me when I arrived, when I said, “Wow,” careful to keep a certain amount of lightness in my voice, like when you slip on the ice and fall hard but assure everyone concerned that you’re just fine, and he said, “I’m sorry, honey.”

I think at that point he probably knew it was bad since the machine those tubes attached him to was removing his blood, cleaning it, and returning it, in an effort to quickly reduce the number of white blood cells which had been replicating unchecked in his blood. A science teacher, a teacher of biology and chemistry, certainly he knew. But he is also a pragmatist with a healthy shot of optimism. In other words, he’ll face what he has to face, but he won’t think the worst until it’s absolutely proven to be happening. Then it’s a matter of science; luck hasn’t much to do with it.

The women from the blood center who worked the machine, who showed me the bags of his blood, both red and white, mentioned chemo to one another. I didn’t let on that I’d heard, but soon I went out into the hallway to find the hematologist and suggested they make an effort to talk to him about the chemo since he had not been told directly that he had anything that necessitated such treatment. I said all this without so much as a crack in my voice. She was unwilling to commit, to declare it was cancer, to say more than that they suspected a form of leukemia, because the lab results weren’t in yet. But she promised to have the resident stop by and explain what they’d learned as soon as she could track him down.

I went to his bedside, and asked if they’d told him they were going to start chemo, that it was likely leukemia. He said no. He stared up at the ceiling. Tears pooled in his eyes. And then they were gone. I told his parents when they arrived–they drove from Minnesota on a feeling that things were not all they appeared to be, parents who had already lost a son to cancer–, that it was likely leukemia. His mother shook her head, said it might not be, that the tests might reveal a less devastating diagnosis, but I was sure, just as I’d known there was something wrong with our son’s development before anyone else believed it could be true.

The resident explained to us what Acute Myeloid Leukemia was. He used simple pictures on a white board to illustrate what had happened in Mark’s body before we could know it was happening. My memory of these moments is solid–I see the room, his rough sketches, and hear the resident’s voice, a reassuring Indian sing-song, clearly–but I’ve turned the information around in my head so many times, trying to apply some sort of logic to the incredible, that I’m afraid each time I speak that I’m repeating some laughable interpretation of the facts like a game of telephone.

As I understand it, a chromosome went wrong and one rogue cell started birthing premature white blood cells which then replicated more premature white blood cells, ad infinitum, driving the platelets and red blood cells out of the neighborhood that was his bone marrow. And because immature cells can’t do the work that mature blood cells can, his immune system was an inadequate barrier against any kind of illness. The cause is a gene mutation, a mutinous enzyme, a scratch on the record, that caused his cellular production to go awry. If left untreated, the immature white blood cells would proliferate until he is dead. Because this new chromosomal error is uneditable, they must clean out his bone marrow and replace it with another person’s.

Some leukemia survivors regard their bone marrow transplant to be a rebirth. They take pictures of themselves celebrating their new birthday. Some report changes in their bodies–gluten intolerance, overly-sensitive skin, a lingering fatigue. Some make vague references to not feeling quite themselves. But I can’t help but fear, in a kind of wondrous disbelief that the best science fiction engenders, that the man I married, whom I have lived with for the past 20 years, will not, at the end of this odyssey, be the same. Is this the ultimate test of nature versus nurture? Creationism versus evolution?

Our son’s neurological disorder is undiagnosed. The closest we get is to say he has a seizure disorder, but there is no answer to the question: why him? There is no cause determined, no prognosis predicted. The geneticists and the neurologists and the epileptologists and the other specialists have looked at his test results, the scans of his brain, the vials of blood and spinal fluid, the space between his eyes, the shape of his fingernails, and found nothing to explain why he is as delayed as he is. Is he–are we?—just unlucky? Perhaps the world would be a friendlier place for him and for me if we had an explanation for the idiopathic symptoms that plague his development and his safety. Maybe we could put the questions to rest–Is it something I did?–but then what good has that done us in Mark’s case? Leukemia is something that makes sense to doctors; it is an affliction that has a rote protocol. But it doesn’t mean we don’t ask the same questions: why him? why us? what happened?

Life strikes. Bang. Mark’s cancer was like a car crash without the car. One day he was home, then the next he was beginning a month in the hospital, the start of a six month process toward getting cured, and maybe a two year process to become himself again. And yet, I took it in stride. Maybe it was shock. Maybe it was the Zoloft I’d been taking for a few years since my anxiety over my son’s health and special needs had turned into constant high wire walking. Maybe it was our son’s recent 3-week hospitalization over the previous Christmas and New Years that had prepared me for another long haul, another effort in compartmentalization, the practice of segmenting my strife from my life.

Because that’s what you do when you abruptly–is there any other way?–learn that your husband has cancer and treatment begins even before either of you has time to prepare. There was no choosing, no strategy, no warning that I would suddenly become a single parent of our special needs child, the primary money-earner, as well as the grateful, if begrudging, hostess to the constant stream of family members and friends and child caregivers and dog walkers and house cleaners who offered their assistance. Every one of the 25 days he was in the hospital, I kept it together. The gun had gone off, the race had begun, the ground moved beneath us, and we had no choice but to run, a marathon and a sprint both. Exertion and fear of stopping forward movement drove every decision, every action.

Most people picture The Big Bang as just that, a big bang. Like a spark and a flame that suddenly brought the universe into being. Energy makes sense. Flipping the lightswitch makes sense. But if the universe truly began not from a bang, but from intense pressure that literally pressed the world into being, then how? I suppose it’s why we look to God; the answers are so minor compared to the wonders of the world, the wonders of blood, the white and the red. One day, long before we knew Mark had cancer, something happened and suddenly? He had cancer.

And maybe there are times in a person’s life that are so combustible that you are fused into another version of yourself. My husband may earn a new life by accepting life from another person, but perhaps he already is becoming someone else. Perhaps it doesn’t take blood to renew the spirit. And perhaps it doesn’t take God either. Perhaps the extreme pressure he is under will change him regardless of the transplant, of the noncancerous cells recreating in his body minutes, days, weeks, and months after. And perhaps the same is true for myself. I wonder, after so much pressure, how much of my previous self is still there? How much of me is memory? And, maybe I wonder, how many times can a person be recreated before the pressure becomes smothering and the light just dies out.

Ripple Effect

~ sehaldorson ~ 2 Comments

The dogs pull on their leashes, burn my hands with their palpable excitement. I reign Kobi in, his large white paws dancing, running in place on the sand, thick nails grabbing for purchase in the granules. Bending, I unhook leash from collar and he runs, all legs, pell-mell down the sun-grayed dock, his eighty-five pounds causing the wood slats to clack and jerk as he runs. Kobi is a glistening copper penny in the late afternoon sun, a cheerful child, my husband’s best friend. He hesitates only a moment before plunging into six feet of green-gray water. I make sure he is swimming safely before I turn my attention to the smaller mutt of a dog waiting impatiently at my feet.

Gracie leans forward, straining at the end of her leash, and barking sharply, repeatedly, as she watches Kobi swim. When I release her from her leash, she too runs down the dock, light and quick, her sled-dog tail a banner waving triumphantly above her back. But just as she reaches the end of the dock, sense surfaces and she skids to a stop. Instead of leaping, she leans forward, her short body coiled, eyes on Kobi as he knifes swiftly through the water, moving out toward the horizon. Gracie yips in frustration, then retreats, the hurdle too menacing for this tough little dog that so willingly takes on all bicycles or dogs daring to cross her path, but fears sprinklers and despises baths. No, Gracie tempers her entry into the water, and instead of leaping, she clips down the rocks piled tenuously along the edge to hold back the sandy beach, and walks herself into the water until she is forced to swim.

Gracie swims, but with uncertainty. She strains to hold her head above water, her slim white-bottomed muzzle reaching up and out of the water. Her small black nose, like a bead, flexes in and out as she breathes. There is nothing swank about Gracie’s style; she swims because she must, because she will be left out if she does not. For Gracie, it is the most taxing of workouts though she is in fine shape. She has a double-coat, and perhaps her line was kept warm by such coats in snowdrift dens dug along an Alaskan trail. Now, she is compelled to leap into a Minnesota lake simply for the pleasure of chasing after her packmate.

The dogs finish their initial lap around the dock and present themselves on the beach. While water slips from Kobi’s back like from the proverbial duck’s when he emerges from the depths, Gracie comes forth saturated, her tail weighted heavily downward and her ears plastered back to her skull, five extra pounds on her slight thirty-five pound frame. They each give vigorous head-to-tip-of-tail shakes and look to us for a clue to the next adventure. My husband tosses a stick, and they repeat the exercise.

For Kobi, swimming is simple. His physical attributes suggest that his ancestors retrieved ducks from marshes, that he was born to be one with the water. He is a big dog, but his chest is shaped like the prow of a ship, cutting efficiently through the water, his thick tail a rudder as he weaves and turns. His fur is sleek, even as he gains a double-coat in the cold months, and he maintains a layer of insulating fat over his muscles even at his leanest weight. Underwater, his legs move in a natural rhythm, his webbed toes helping push back water, gain distance.

By the end of the afternoon, the dogs tire and they spend more time along the beach. Kobi has attempted to chase down a jetski zipping by, bouncing on the wake created from its last pass. My husband calls him back, deciding it is best to keep the dogs near shore during this busy time on the lake. Kobi entertains himself by wading further down the shallow shoreline, his muzzle eye-deep in the water. My husband is by his side to investigate his finds. Occasionally, Kobi stops and paws at the bottom of the lake. There are minnows (I can feel their small bodies lightly strike my ankles as they swim maniacally about, frenzied by the chaos of two dogs and two humans invading their territory), a thick weed bed, and numerous rocks peppering the sand at the bottom of the lake keep Kobi busy searching. Occasionally, he dunks his entire head underwater to peer more closely at his treasure, his ears floating on the water like small lily pads. Briefly, he will settle on a spot, and begin to dig, kicking up sand clouds beneath the water. Success may come in the form of a stick he releases from its sandy confines, a large rock that rolls onto my husband’s toe or even an old plastic grocery bag. When Kobi completes his archeological dig, he wades out into deeper depths, only his head above the water, like Nessie, like a Kobi-shark, we joke.

Gracie, uninterested in Kobi’s pursuits, cares only for the tennis ball, and the inevitable result (another throw!) of bringing the ball back to me. I stand along the shallow water at the shore and throw the ball along the edge of the sand beneath an overhand of trees. The water is sun-dappled and Gracie retrieves eagerly, splashing through the water with abandon upon each throw. Catching prey, like catching Kobi, is Gracie’s pleasure. She is not any easy dog with a defensive dislike for most other dogs, but Gracie’s free spirit when she is running is a gift to my soul, and now she warms my heart with her wide-eyed, high-wire abandonment. While Kobi may be born to the water, Gracie was born to move along the ground.

At dinnertime, we coax the dogs out of the water and briskly towel them off. Still damp, Kobi’s fur curls slightly, and Gracie has recovered some of her size and tail fluff. We clip their collars to tie-outs, and watch for a minute as each dog munches from their bowl of kibble. There is something about the past hours with these dogs that reminds me of their greatest daily gift to me. Dogs instruct us to live more simply, I believe, to trust in instinct, and revel in the most basic of pleasures of being physical beings. With that thought, I dig into my own dinner, and wonder if I could be any happier than this. And there was no way of knowing that that happiness would be short-lived. But that’s the thing with dogs: we always know their lives will be short–hopefully, but oh so regretfully, shorter than ours.

Consumed

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She yearned for something sweet. She toasted Pop Tarts, the hot sugar cooled like Elmer’s Glue to her finger tips and tongue. She spooned gold honey into Earl Grey, threads of nectar stringing between jar and cup where it pooled in the dregs and she tipped her head back to receive the thick liquid on her tongue. She boiled Honey Crisp apples and brown sugar and cinnamon into a hot mash, dropped a scoop of Breyers, flecked with vanilla bean, into the center of the lava, dredging her finger along the smooth contour of the bowl so as not to miss a drop.

She became harder to please. She bought crinkly cellophane cookie trays from Nabisco and popped buttery circles into her mouth, one after another, her teeth crushing grains of granulated sugar, her tongue peeping out into the corners of her lips to catch spare crumbs. She thawed whole Sara Lee cakes layered with oily buttercream and dry sponge, carved her fork through the lacquered frosting, pressed the tines against the exposed cardboard disc below the cake to scrape up the tacky remains. She counted the number of licks it took to get to the center of Tootsie Pops; she cut thin seams into her tongue as she dragged it along the rough edges of a Blow Pop just before driving her molars through the candied shell and into the soft center that she dragged off the stick with her front teeth; she chewed handfuls of multi-hewed Jelly Belly beans, the jumble of peculiar flavors mixed with her saliva into a sweet, indistinct morass.

Soon she was never satisfied. She filled her pockets with brown packets of raw sugar, shooting the crystals down at stoplights. She stirred Jello, the pink-tinted powder into boiled water and drank it down like water, a sticky film filling her mouth and throat. She emptied boxes of Captain Crunch and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp into a red and white bowl labeled “Popcorn” and ladled handfuls into her mouth until her cheeks bulged as she struggle to chew, a mouthful of stones, and her tastebuds stung, enraged. She ordered flats of Dunkin Donuts, a dozen of each kind, telling the bakery to bill the local high school PTA (“for the chess club fundraiser”), and crawled into the back cargo area of her SUV with the carton, and eventually succeeded in folding a greasy-doughed Boston Cream into her mouth, whole.

With each jolt of glucose, her fingers and toes twitched and tingled, her center thrummed with artificial electricity, but she also remembered, in the ripples and echoes of sensation, that time when she had been loved. She remembered when he had tenderly taken her head in his hands, the flat of his palms supporting the weight of her skull, taking the burden of all her heaving thoughts onto the thick bones of his fingers, and her body had been flooded with an elemental relief, like fire and water both, nothing simulated, just sweet.