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Joyce Kiefer |
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The Christmas news a wife doesn't ever want to hear
of TheColumnists.com
It’s strange how your life can change, not with a drum roll, but with something as easy to miss as an overheard phone call.
I walked in the door from a Friday afternoon of shopping and high tea with an old friend. Christmas is great, I felt. It makes us step out to value the company of old friends.
I didn’t like the tone of the phone conversation my husband was having as I entered the kitchen. “Yes, I’ll get that done on Monday. . . OK. . . Yes.” When he hung up, I felt more than knew that the doctor had just told him the results of a medical test he had earlier that week. Bill has prostrate cancer.
When I was a child believing in Santa Claus, cancer spelled “death.” Perhaps a trip to Lourdes could save a person with cancer but all a doctor could do was chop you bit by bit until one day he opened you up, shrugged in despair, put down the knife, and sewed you up again. “The doctors (always plural) couldn’t do a thing,” the rumor mill went. The person--a family friend, a neighbor, my uncle--didn’t live long after that.
But now our friends tell us about people we know who have survived prostrate cancer. We never knew some of them had the disease at all. Incredible progress has been made in treating the disease. But best of all, the doctors have handed our bodies back to us. Bill’s doctor told him to spend the weekend researching treatments through the doctor’s website. Our daughter also went to work and found good information. She was a research scientist at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City. Our friends have pitched in–one works with medical devices involving brachyotherapy; another can link us up with a friend who is an oncologist; others offer bits of information that fill out our picture.
Tomorrow we find out if the cancer has spread. If so, the advice will have to change and we’ll enter the combat zone in the fight for life. I say “we” because I plan to ask a million questions and not accept the words “it’s too late.” Not yet.
The Christmas season seems an ironic time to receive news like this. All our celebrations, things to be done, fade to gray. Or do they?
When the phone call came, I had a pinafore half-made for my five-year-old granddaughter Gwynne. I also had an embroidery piece with her name and birth date. Five years and I still hadn’t made this for her. She hung the one I’d stitched for her older sister in her room. She deserved her own. But I felt numb with the doctor’s news. I should spend my time reading everything written about cancer. But Gwynne had lost her paternal grandfather to cancer this fall. How could I delay her Christmas present because another grandfather now has cancer? In the back of her mind, she would connect Christmas with death.
I stitched away and finished the piece. But I still had to mount, mat and frame it. I showed the piece to the clerk at an art supply store. She said it looked like a painting. That encouraged me to search hard for the right sized mat and plan a trip to yet another store for the right color frame. Then the whole piece has to be packed up and sent. I’ll be standing in line at the post office while Bill is having a bone test.
But Christmas has actually worked out well for the timing of our news. Earlier in the week my friend Louise took the train down from Sacramento to spend a day and a night with me here in Silicon Valley. Half-way through her journey she called to tell me the train had stopped. The train in front of her had hit someone and killed him. The coroner had to arrive, followed by the clean up crew.
About an hour later she called again. Her train was on its way.
Louise’s husband had surgery for bladder cancer this past fall. The cancer will return but the doctors will know exactly what to do, she said. They plan a trip to China this spring.
The gift of Christmas is life itself–life of the body and life of the soul–God in charge of it all.
©2006 by Joyce Kiefer. This column
first posted Dec. 18, 2006.
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