10.13.03 - 6:11 p.m.

so, it's official now: my mom has cancer. first, an unexpected fast-growing tumor. then, a positive CA-125 test, a blood born marker for ovarian cancer. then, the meeting with the gynecological oncologist, who said he thought the blood test was a false positive, and thought that she could wait until november or later for surgery.

mom didn't want to wait. none of us wanted her to wait, so she scheduled surgery for the next available day - still almost two weeks away - and in the meantime, the surgeon did a uterine biopsy. today, mom had a meeting with the surgical team and found out the results of the biopsy: positive for cancerous tissue.

which means this is stage II at least.

i wasn't ready for this: i assumed it would be negative. surgeons know these things, right? they have a sense for them. worse, when i called home my mom wasn't home yet. dad told me that he had had a voice mail from her, and she said things went well. that's what he thought she said, or maybe that's just what i heard. so, while dad and i were talking, my mom pulled up and dad gave me a play by play - the car is in the driveway, i don't see her yet, that sort of thing - and then he said she would probably need to go to the bathroom, and the phone reaches into the bathroom. i told him he shouldn't've told me that because i think it's important to conceal one's bathroom use while on the phone. just say... you're washing your hands, or rinsing out a teacup.

so, i asked my mom, cheerily, thinking everything was fine and this was all a big scare, or at least - given the time frame (she had been to the gynecologist a month before the tumor was discovered and there was no evidence of it) - the tumor had not had time to spread to her uterus and then there was this... long pause, and i could hear the catch in her voice and then this long silence, dead air.

they're not moving the surgery up: i think they should, duh. i mean, if it grew that quickly, what does a two week, three week, four week delay mean for her? but harder than that: what do i say? where do i take this and put it? how do i fold this up and how do i do something? what if she dies? she's only 56. never smoked. never drank. hasn't done anything particularly wrong.

my grandmother always said that bad things come in threes. i was 10 the year my grandfather died. it was january, and we got out of school early because it was snowing. my mom was in law school, and my dad was teaching, and i was outside shoveling the sidewalk when the phone rang and i ran inside and my aunt barbara was on the phone, asking for my dad. how weird, i thought, and told her he was at work, and told her his number.

i don't remember my dad telling me about my grandfather, but i remember the flight up there. flights up there, to altoona. we had a jet from huntington to pittsburgh - they still flew jets on that route, then - and then we had a tiny plane from pittsburgh to johnstown, and in johnstown the snow banks - where the snow had been plowed up from the runway and carved by the wind - where twice as tall as me, or at least, that's how they seem in memory.

in johnstown, we changed planes, from a tiny plane to an even tinier plane. it was snowing as we took off, and the wind was pretty fierce.

there was a lot less snow in altoona. someone picked us up at the airport - it must have been my uncle bob, or maybe we rented a car - and we went to my grandmother's house and there she was looking so crumpled. my grandfather had collapsed and died from a heart attack in the house that morning.

he had always handled their finances, and rather dubiously, i later learned, after my grandmother's death. when my uncle was in vietnam, he sent money back to his parents to pay off his student loans, and my grandfather took the money and used it to pay his bills because he was unemployed at the time. my grandmother hadn't handled any of that, and after he died, she found so little money that she had to borrow the money from her children. and, of course, she insisted that she pay it back even though they said that that was not necessary.

so, that was january. two months later, late one friday night, i was nextdoor babysitting the nextdoor neighbors' three children. the family was from ireland. maybe the husband taught at marshall? anyway, i was babysitting when i went home, and my mother was home - she didn't come home every weekend - and her eyes were completely and totally red from crying and my dad told me that my grandmother had died. now, my grandmother had had cancer for a long time. she had cancer of the mouth. we spent christmas in philadelphia that year because she was too sick to travel. she lost her teeth, and she wouldn't go to mass because she was embarrassed by the way she looked. the priest brought the eucharist to her at home.

she drank ensure, i remember, because she couldn't take anything else. that's why i can't stand the silly drink ensure! for your health! commercials that abound on television now: the product is intensely bound up with the peripheral experience of my grandmother's illness and decline.

my grandmother lived with her sister and her daughter. her sister, my aunt betty, had a huge irish setter named christian kelly. christian was a mean old dog. he liked to play with his ball, but if he wasn't in the mood for playing, he would bare his teeth and groooowl at you. he was so strong that my aunt - who was several years older than my grandmother (my grandmother was 81 or 82 at the time) and consequently quite frail - had to tie his lead to the frame of her car in order to "walk him" at this grass area beneath those big powerlines - the metal x-shaped ones that i once heard referred to as marching monsters.

so, shortly after my grandmother's death, the dog collapsed on the threshold of the door. he wouldn't or couldn't get up, not even to eat. he just lay there. only aunt betty and i were home, and he was too heavy for an old, old woman and a little girl to move, so we waited for every else to get home.

somehow, my parents and my aunt susie struggled and got the dog into the car. they took him to the vet's office, and the vet brought out a stretcher and carried him inside. the vet said he should be put to sleep, but aunt betty didn't want to think about that. the vet wouldn't let them use the stretcher to take him home, even though they promised to return it, so when they came back they struggled and struggle to lift his awkward 120 lb dog out of the back of the car. after some 10 minutes of struggle, he was mostly out and suddenly he got up, went to pee, and ran up the stairs and into the house. i don't think he got up again, though, and they had him put to sleep before we left.

so: bad things happen in threes. this summer, my other grandmother died. now my mom is sick, and i'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop.