My Madonnas
As she exhales she moans. Sometimes she pushes the air out, like a weight lifter heaving a large barbell towards the ceiling. In hindsight I now understand that her lungs were filling with fluid. Then I just thought it was her signature sound — a type of fever-induced snore, if you will.
Her temperature is climbing. It’s at 39.8 degrees Celsius. I keep Googling conversions to translate her status and understand we are now close to 104.
She moves her hand to her chest. Her heart is thumping loud, hard, fast. It feels like a hummingbird. Soon the night doctor will flick the light on and start cracking glass vials full of liquid into her PICC line in order to slow her heartbeat. It works for awhile but then the cycle will begin again.
I am curled up beside her. We are 6,000 miles away from home. We’ve come to Vienna in search of an alternative treatment to pancreatic cancer that has now spread to her lungs.
She is my mom. She is determined to live. She wants to see my daughter graduate from high school and my son graduate from college. She refuses to be defined by her illness and, three years post-diagnosis, she’s already beaten so many odds. There is one slight problem though — the side effects of her treatment are way more severe than we’d anticipated.
She indicates she is feeling nauseous so I get behind her and hoist her into a sitting position. I am kneeling and she leans into me. My legs are quivering trying to keep her upright. Her urge to vomit passes and she lays down again. I slump into the mattress and pull the covers over my head. It occurs to me that this entire endeavor is totally, freaking nuts.
Four days into this cycle we transfer to a hospital with an ICU. We race across town in an ambulance with blue lights flashing. The paramedic wants to know her insurance company so I search my bags for her passport and insurance card but come up empty handed. In the rush to leave her clinic, I’ve left all of her important papers behind. I call my step father who is now back in the United States. It’s the middle of the night for him but I’m hoping he’ll have the information we need. Once logistics are handled a lump fills my throat. “Poppi,” I say. “I don’t know if she’s going to make it.”
In the attempt to save her life there is a lot of clamor — IV alarms, sirens, the constant voices of doctors and nurses entering and leaving her room. There are also calls, emails and texts from worried friends and family back at home but it all starts to slide past me like water in a stream. I’m on sensory overload.
I’m not allowed to sleep in her room at the hospital so I return for the evening to the deep silence of our temporary apartment. It’s an old building that survived WWII. There is a water spigot next to the elevator — a remnant of a time when all families had to fetch their water from a communal faucet on each floor. The building is made of thick stone and brick so when you enter the sounds of cars and people instantly give way to perfect stillness. In the quiet, every emotion I put on ice just to get her through the previous week now begins to thaw.
I call home and my husband answers. “Dan,” I stutter. “I don’t know what to do.” My tears unleash and sobs begin to lurch from my body. He listens for a long time and receives my entire, melting, glacier of grief.
At some point my daughter hops on the phone and the conversation turns to a concern I haven’t yet given voice to — how will I get Mom’s body home if she dies? Dan says he’ll handle all of the research. Lucy pauses for a moment then wonders if I would consider using the suitcase. A series of scenes flash before me — tucking Mom into the bag; rolling her through the airport; the shocked face of the TSA and customs agents. It’s utterly morbid humor but I start to laugh and it’s the first laugh I’ve had all week.
Back at the hospital, the tide starts to turn in our favor. They suspect she has pneumonia and her new doctor is pumping Mom with antibiotics and diuretics. It’s working! Her fever starts to drop, her breathing slowly returns to normal and her heart stops going crazy. We take a photo and post it on Facebook to celebrate. Five days later we are finally released back into the real world.
The next morning we return to Mom’s cancer treatment center. She wants to finish what she flew all this way to receive. The infusion begins and she sinks into the chair. Soon her cheeks start getting red. Next she begins to vomit red foam. Her fever climbs up to 39.7. Within another hour she starts to moan as she exhales. The sound is faint at first but I know what it means now and I plead with the doctor to stop her treatments. I add “I think her lungs are starting to fill with fluid again.”
He glares at me and snaps back “Don’t say that. Her lungs are not filling with fluid. Everything is totally fine.”
It’s his arrogance that tips me over the edge. He’s so certain he’s right and so quickly dismissive of my concerns. I’m trying to prevent another decent into hell for my mom. Everything is NOT fine but he’s not listening. For a moment I consider ripping his limbs off with my bare hands.
I walk outside to clear my mind. I don’t know this city and I can’t speak the language but I wander down the street and stumble upon a church. I plant myself in front of candles glowing beneath the image of Mary and I begin to pray. I am a newb to prayer. I never hear anything back so it mainly feels like talking to myself. However, I’m desperate. After five years of trying to save the lives of my son and my mom, I am at the end of my rope. I look at Mary then mentally summon every relative I’ve known who has died. “Please help me. Please, please help me,” I mutter. No clarity washes over me. Yet, looking into Mary’s eyes, it’s calming to see a female image of divine love. It’s also nice that she’s not bloody and nailed to a cross. I’ve had enough of blood.
Then I remember Omi, my husband’s Jewish grandmother. She entered St. Stephen’s Cathedral here in Vienna one day during World War II to pray right before she thought she was going to be deported to a concentration camp. She had kissed her daughter goodbye that morning thinking she would never see her again. Instead, Omi managed to return home that very same evening with a passport she would use throughout the rest of the war to survive under a false name and a false Catholic identify. Her form of survival was scrappy. She was a Jew in the heart of Nazi territory but, through some form of alchemy, she came out the other end alive and without bitterness.
Mary lost her bread-breaking son on a cross. Omi lost her violin-playing husband to a concentration camp. They both must have stumbled around the planet with a soul full of grief but, with time, somehow were able to feel joy and laughter again. I begin walking toward my mom. The wind is brisk. I head down the wrong street but slowly wend my way through European streets until I reach the large wooden door of the clinic. I pull up a chair and sit, once again, by my mother’s side while my madonnas, Mary and Omi, have my back.
