The Cabbage Patch Gurl

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.