Saturday, December 16, 2006 at 11:01 am (Defining Life, Just An Update)
“Khali haath shaam aaye hai, khaali haath jaeygi.” – Chitra Singh gazal
Empty-handed the evening came and now it shall leave once again, empty-handed.
Where have we come in the past week? I feel like I’ve gone on a very long journey with my brother and his wife and it’s hard to figure whether we got anywhere or if it just brought us back to the same initial point – that there is no cure and that she should go back to her family in India once she’s strong enough to withstand the journey, which will hopefully be soon.
I wish I could have been there for my brother as he lives through something that’s worse than his worst nightmare. I wish I had never lost touch with him. I wish I had been there for him emotionally the whole while. I wish I wish I wish… my heart is full of regrets and I guess they’ll just sit there forever. I do feel guilty – not the cliche way when people say it’s all their fault, but honestly and truly, I have to accept that I have played a part in this woman’s cancer reaching a point where there’s no options left.
I went out for the first time yesterday in a whole week. It doesn’t feel good at all. I just can’t have a good time while my brother’s world is ripping to pieces. But one of my friend’s turned 30 and I knew that hardly anyone was going to show up for the surprise evening that her husband had planned for her, she’s not part of the mainstream ‘in-group’ in the research program that we’re in, so that’s just how it goes. So I went and so did one other guy from the program. I made her cupcakes and put candles in them, bought her a group card, brought along my friends from outside the research program, and hung out with her for as long as she wanted. Because not everyone gets to turn 30 one day. Not everyone gets to be happily married, it’s rare and special. And because I feel like the more good I do for others, the more good karma I’ll accumulate and then I can transfer it to my brother’s wife.
I’ve barely been productive at work for the past week and perhaps now I’ve finally reached a point were I might actually be more productive, so weekend or not, I’m just going to work everyday now till I go back home on Christmas eve. That’s the only thing that has the potential to do anyone any good at this point in my life.
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Friday, December 15, 2006 at 1:18 pm (Sniff sniff, The Blues?)
Someone please stop my brother’s world from ripping up beneath him, please please please help, please don’t let this happen to someone who means the world to him because it’s just not fair. You don’t just marry someone and then find out a year later that you’ve only got a few months to go with her.
I desperately want to stand on top of a tall building and scream and scream till there’s no voice left to scream with anymore. I don’t want to accept this, I hate it every bit of it and I don’t want to hear him sounding so sad and hopeless. She’s getting sicker and sicker by the day and it’s not fair. IT’S NOT FAIR.
There are so many people here and around the world working at the cures for all these venomous cancers, but even then, if even one person dies of cancer it means that we haven’t worked hard enough. But it’s not just one – so many people are dying of cancer everyday, so many people are withering away day by day through this slow and painful death – who even knows how many. It’s just not fair and I just won’t understand why it has to be this way.
I don’t want to be a doctor anymore, I’ve had it. People get sick and they die and I don’t want to have to deal with that. I don’t want to watch them suffer. I don’t want to watch their families cry. What the heck was I thinking, I just want to be a math teacher or something. Maybe I still have a chance at being an engineer or a software programmer – I know I could be good at that. Please let me just run away from all this – it hurts too much.
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Wednesday, December 13, 2006 at 12:51 pm (Defining Life, Just An Update, Two Roads Diverged)
In continuation from the previous post.
Day 4 of knowing it. Found out from my brother that his wife doesn’t particularly want chemo, she just wants to go home to India where her parents live – spend whatever time there’s left with them. They can’t come here, they don’t have visas. She can’t come back easily once she steps out of the country. And my brother’s the one who wants to find out treatment options and second opinions.
So much tension, so many visa issues, so many things to think about. So little time. So little time. So many questions. Not enough answers. So little time. How much time though?
It’s like being told that you need to pack for a long journey but no one’s telling you when it’ll be time to leave or how much you need to pack with you or whether you are leaving soon in the first place and if there’s a way to not leave so soon anyway.
Life really is like a Pick-a-Path book. Have you read one of those? That’s the sort of book where you start a story and by the end of the page you need to make a decision on what you’d like the character to do next. Turn to page 43 if you choose the first option, turn to page 27 if you choose the second. Then you read page 43 and make your next decision. And it goes on like that till you reach the end of the path, at which point you can shut the book or else go back to the last set of options you had and choose something different, see where that takes you. Life’s like that, except that usually you don’t get to go back to a point that you left behind and then choose again.
Day 5. They’ve gone to one of the top hospitals in California to get a second opinion. I gave them the contact and so I feel very invested in the course that things will take from here. I understand her point of view, who wouldn’t want to be with their family when you’ve been told that you have a few more months to go. But I understand my brother’s view too – if there’s hope then why not pick up on it and do something. I’m at the nation’s biggest research hospital and it turns out that they have only one clinical trial related to this tumor. Fate made it such that his wife seems like a good candidate for this – she fits all the preliminary eligibility criteria. Now we’re getting more records and scans sent over to the investigators. But what of that? What will all this mean – will they come here, will she want to be in this trial, would it work out, will they go back to India instead…
There are no answers. What will happen next in this girl’s life? I don’t know how things will turn out and the suspense that’s wrapped up in it all is just reminding me more and more of how indefinite and unpredictable life is. I’m out of tears, there are no more left at all. Don’t want to spend time with people just yet nor talk much to anyone– just need to be in a quiet and peaceful environment for a while, nothing to interrupt the serenity I’m trying to create around me. Trying to get things done on a schedule that is piling up with deadlines but my mind doesn’t want to focus right now…. someone will yell at me for not getting these documents done from a week ago. In the evenings the company I’ve chosen for the past couple days is that of two innocent little boys who know nothing yet of the pain in this world, one’s 3 and the other is 5. Today we will make Christmas piñatas out of paper mache over a balloon and cover them with red and green tissue and then lots of spiderman stickers.
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Monday, December 11, 2006 at 8:51 pm (Defining Life, Just An Update, Sniff sniff, Sunshine & Rain)
Life has been happening.
The past couple days have been such a whirlwind. My younger brother, the nicest guy I ever got to know (whose actually a couple years older than me but I made him into my ‘little brother’ four years ago and I can’t help but feel like his protective older sister) got back in touch with me after about two years of losing touch because he needed to see if I could help him. Over the last two days I’ve been getting to learn more about the woman he married one and a half years ago and the story has gradually become clearer about how this dear 26-year-old girl has metastatic cancer that seems to have taken over her liver and now their doctor has told them there’s nothing more they can do.
Day 1 of knowing this: Found out all the essential details I could think of and considered who I could contact. Felt a lot more indifferent then what I thought I would feel like considering the fact that my brother was basically telling me that his wife was dying.
Day 2 of knowing it. Woke up in the morning and felt like throwing up. I cried, louder and harder than I’d ever cried before, as if the world was ending, as if there was nothing left to be happy about, as if my dear little brother’s world was shattering around him. And really it was.
But the crying had to end, the tears had to run out, the thoughts had to give way to something more than the despair of knowing that nothing could change what had already happened.
Day 3. I finally learnt what it feels like to be at the other side of the fence. All of a sudden I wasn’t the medical student walking with a team of doctors at the research hospital and meeting another patient who was part of yet another cancer clinical trial. Now I was the desperate friend calling doctors who seemed like experts on this rare tumor, now I was describing to the umpteenth research nurse what had happened in the past 4 months of this poor girl’s life and trying to see if there was a way we could get second opinions soon. Now I was the one watching the clock tick, twiddle my thumbs in front my phone, and check the dial tone to figure out why no one was returning my calls yet.
Now I was the one silently preparing myself for the whole range of options – maybe things could work out, maybe they won’t. Maybe there was still hope left in terms of cures, or maybe there wasn’t much at all. Maybe it was time to accept the dismal prognosis, or maybe it wasn’t and this was still the time to keep fighting it.
I don’t know what’ll happen. We’re still trying, we’re still calling people, we’re still hoping for the best, we’re still searching for second opinions. This story continues to unfold with each day so much so that there just isn’t time to waste feeling all sad about it – there’s work to be done.
And it suddenly struck me that I think I do want to be an oncologist or an infectious disease doc. I feel like it just might give my life the meaning that I’ve searched for for a long time.
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