Category: Duct Tape and Prayers

The shrillness of the phone pierces through the fogs of my dreaming, and habit forces me to grab it and check. It’s my father, just my father. Unthinkingly, I note the time and hit mute. It’s only 6pm, they said they would call after camp was over, status on the sick family dog. I fall back into dreams, the phone silent.

I wake again, on my own, night beginning to soften the brilliant blue sky, birds quieting down in the gloaming. I call my father, but there is no answer. No answer? At that time of day? Odd. Check messages.

There is a tightness in my father’s voice. A vagueness I recognize. I call my sister.

The cancer has returned.

In the further chronicles of my delightfully insane family, my parents have a bet going. They’re “racing” to see which of them grows in hair faster, my mom or my dad. Now, since Dad’s been thinning out on top for a while now, he’s trying to grow in his beard. And Mom? Well, given the chemo and all, she’s just trying to achieve hair, period.

Apparently they’re neck and neck right now, but I’ve suggested Mom cheat and add folic acid and/or prenatal vitamins to her diet, to accelerate her hair growth.

…I’m not entirely sure what the prize for this race is, but I really can’t wait to see a picture of my father with a beard. The last time he had any facial hair at all, I was knee high to a grasshopper and it was the 70s; the memories are all vaguely pea soup green and amber tinted, so you know it was bad.

When you’re in a house with two academics, the stereotype of an absentminded engineer, and my mother, who has always had her own special brand of space case, the question of chemo brain turns in to not wondering if it exists, but wondering if it can affect all of us, even if only one person is getting the chemo. And our conclusion was yes; for Mom, chemo brain might have been caused by the chemo, but for the rest of us, it was the manifestation of the severe stress we (especially my father) were under.

And let me tell you, we did some precious stupid things. I would find keys in the fridge or freezer – both mine and others – and an assortment of items were found frozen over the months. And I, I have always been of the extremely absentminded academic type (something that may surprise those who know me more recently in my role as supremely organized, but that’s just an illusion, trust me); I went from my normal levels of distracted to an entirely new realm I had never imagined, where I would pause mid-activity, trying to remember what I was doing (even though everything was in front of me as a massive clue), I would leave important paperwork sitting outside in the rain, and eventually had to leave detailed notes to myself in order to stay on track.

Of us all, my sister is the only one who seemed only minorly affected – she’d do the same stupid misplace things, and get sillystupid at night. But I suspect her long experience with cancer simply inurred her to what Dad and I were dealing with.

But it turns out that for a long time, what we joked so casually about, all of us having chemo brain, was actually considered an illusion, a fake symptom by women who wanted more attention. This baffles me, not from my normal standpoint of “but the mind and body are one, and if you do something massive to the body, like say flood it with toxins, you can’t honestly expect the mind to escape unscathed, can you?” but from the standpoint of someone who has seen the actual chemical chemo brain effect in her mother, and experienced the stress related version that afflicts caretakers. Having experienced both first-hand, I wonder how doctors ever become so isolated from their patients that they could ever be so dismissive of so obvious a problem.