A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (26 page)

The Hidden Assets were great friends, each of us possessing larger-than-life personalities. By this time, we had several of these performances at various parties under our belts. Lyn’s husband, Bob, wearing a conquistador’s helmet, heralded the upcoming performance of our group as he pranced across the deck carrying the three-foot-by-two-foot black felt sign, edged in lace, handmade by Jane, with The Hidden Assets craftily scripted in Elmer’s glue and gold glitter.

Out through the door and onto the deck to a chorus of hoots and hollers came Mary, Jane, Lyn, Kelly, and me, dressed in our costumes of short skirts and large men’s white shirts ready to sing “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”

The best thing about being a woman
Is the prerogative to have a little fun
Oh, oh, oh! Go totally crazy …”

We were great! The husbands loved it and were especially excited when we stripped off our white shirts, revealing T-shirts, and did the cancan.

It was time for the intermission, and dinner, before things got too wild. Too late, someone was screaming Fire. There were actually two. One of the real tiki torches had fallen over and was setting some of the landscaping on fire. At the same time, up around the decking of the pool, the tiki mask candle in one of the centerpieces had fallen over and lit one of the rental tables on fire after melting the orange plastic tablecloth. (We had to pay for the table later.) No big deal—all was well. It was now time for me to have my first drink, forgetting my stomach in all the excitement.

The servers had set up the dinner buffet, and while our guests were enjoying the fruits of Doug’s culinary expertise, other guests rushed to form duos and quartets, attempt harmonies, and serenade the diners. Whenever there was a break in the music, Doug and the now inebriated Kim tried without much success to sing a song. They were so out of tune and slurred I had to put an end to it before the guests started leaving or heaving. This is when I noticed that under his safari vest and over his T-shirt, Doug was wearing a black strapless bra—and it didn’t belong to me. I could only imagine what our son Brad, almost 12, was making of this bacchanal when he intermittently tore himself away from his computer game.

Once dinner was served, I could finally really relax and have fun. The singing continued. The Hidden Assets reprised a former number—“Stop! In the Name of Love”–complete with our feather boas. Then the Assets surprised me with their own routine dedicated to me, “How Sweet It is to Be Loved by You,” the James Taylor version of the great song originated by Marvin Gaye. I was touched and humbled, and impressed by what a great dancer Mary was. She had so much soul. I felt loved.

The party was still in full swing when my mother decided to bypass the stairs to step onto the deck, missed, and gouged a chunk out of her shin. In the midst of all the revelry, Alane came to get me to take a look at Mom’s leg. After assessing the wound, and not in the mood to tolerate any belligerence or martyrdom, I decided I would have to leave my party to take both parents to the emergency room. Everyone else was trashed, unable to drive. I ordered my parents to the car.

At the emergency room, Mom was visibly frightened and crying. The doctor told her she would need several stitches and a tetanus shot. At one point, she said in a tiny childlike voice, “The only time I’ve ever been in the hospital was when I had you kids.”

I wish I could say I had empathy for her, but I didn’t. I thought, You big baby, stop your blubbering. When she wailed at the tetanus shot, I wanted to kill her. As she was complaining about the scar she would have on her leg as the doctor was stitching her up, I thought, You bitch, how could I have even imagined that you had any idea of what my life has been like.

I felt sorry for Dad, standing helpless and far away from the childlike spectacle of my mother. The clock ticked away the remainder of my party while we waited to be discharged. I wondered if subconsciously she’d planned to once again make it all about her. I decided that the next day, limping or not, infected, even gangrenous, they were leaving. I was getting a car to take them back to the airport.

As I suspected, when we arrived back at home the party was pretty much over. Doug was passed out. Mom and Dad went to bed. Kim was in the tiki hut sucking face with the guy I thought was her “friend.” The karaoke company was hauling away the equipment while Alane and Mary were cleaning up the remnants of the party in the kitchen. After a bit, I insisted on driving Mary home since I didn’t think she would make it otherwise—she was insisting on walking home, almost a mile up a big hill, after midnight.

When we arrived at her house a few minutes later, I walked her to the door, pointing out a hose lying across our path. Despite my warning, she tripped over it and fell face first on the stone walk. She insisted she was OK and once I ascertained that there was no visible bleeding to attend to, I left her in her house and drove home. She was still chanting “I’m OK. I’m OK” as I pulled away.

The next day, while everyone was attending to their hangovers, Mom and Dad left in the black town car. I waved good-bye, feeling guilty but only as long as it took me to walk from the curb to the front door. Back inside the house I began making phone calls to invite people over for the traditional day-after party to eat the leftovers and watch the video of the event.

My out-of-town guests and The Hidden Assets, absent their husbands, came over. We were still waiting for Mary when the dog’s barking alerted us that someone was coming up the front drive. It was Mary in a hospital gown, using a walker, sporting a shiner equal to a ten-round heavyweight boxing match. Several construction workers working on a remodel across the street were standing at the end of our front walk staring at the spectacle of this hospital patient coming to our house. Leave it to Mary to play down her real injuries; hanging out of the open back of her hospital gown was a very large naked plastic ass. I could see why the workers might have thought it was real from a distance.

At the end of the day, we all rated the party a great success but decided that in the future maybe we should have an ambulance and a fire truck rented and on standby. The next party, I decided, would be when I lived to the fifth anniversary, the next milestone, with even worse supporting statistics. I couldn’t imagine. Kim would be graduated from college and working. Brad would be midway through high school. I would be so blessed to see that day. But for now, there was a today.

It took the whole summer to clean up the mess.

Chapter 24

July 2002–June 2003

W
hile passing the milestone of my 45th birthday we began to formulate plans with an architect for a house remodel. In August, Doug and Brad went out for a chartered deep sea fishing trip off the coast of Mexico, and I headed to Santa Barbara to spend a few days with Kim. She was thriving and involved in so many activities, especially ones that involved women’s issues. I could see that she was hardly ever at the beach. I was so proud of her. One more year and she would be done with college.

Her apartment was half of a duplex fronting the ocean high on a bluff with her room in the upper loft overlooking the surf. The décor of the house was heavily varnished wood paneling similar to a ship’s interior. It was quite a sanctuary from the Animal House–like ambiance of Del Playa, the party street of Isla Vista near the campus. During the day, Del Playa sparkled from the shards of green, brown, and clear broken glass while young males in boxer shorts chugged liquids on the street-facing balconies—not unlike Bourbon Street in New Orleans, except for the architecture. Pairs of sneakers dangled overhead from the utility lines and the humid coastal air carried the smells of rotting garbage, vomit, and the smoke from smoldering sofas.

At night, and especially on the weekend, the streets were like Mardi Gras—hordes of young, long-haired blonde females in short shorts or short skirts strutted back and forth, drinks in hand, between the shirtless well-muscled young men sporting surfing tans, all checking each other out. Giggling and hooting erupted frequently—the mating calls of Homo americanus. Couples paired up and left for doorways or darkened corners. It was very different from when I was this age; everything seemed so overt, hormones on overdrive.

After a dinner in town we went back to Kim’s apartment to get caught up on our lives and our sleep. But as the evening wore on the music of the street became louder with the thumping of multiple subwoofers, the pounding rhythm of rap, rapid-fire booms and crashes, sounds of shattering glass.

The next day I was given a tour of the Women’s Health Center where Kim was spending many hours volunteering and doing peer counseling with female students. She was active in the university’s Take Back the Night campaign, which was making strides in campus safety and facilitating sex crime reporting. She was also involved in WETT, the Women’s Ensemble Theatre Troupe, which was putting on The Vagina Monologues on “V-Day.” Kim’s part involved depicting the various types of female orgasms, complete with sound effects. How did she know these things? I wondered. I left her in her college environs and returned home, surprised by how little I really knew my child—who was no longer a child but a young woman with her own identity, interests, and talents.

September was filled with return checkups with more doctors. My blood tests were starting to reveal that I was consistently showing elevated serum calcium levels. My oncologist thought I should consult with an endocrinologist, another specialist, to evaluate the possibility of hyperparathyroidism, which could be caused by benign parathyroid adenomas. Was this next? This was supposed to be my off year.

Long before, I had noticed a pattern—all of the tumors were diagnosed in odd-numbered years—breast cancers in 1993 and 1995, funky fibroid tumors in 1997 and 1999, and pancreatic cancer in 2001. It was now 2002. I wanted to break the trend by not getting any more tumors, not by getting another tumor in an even-numbered year.

The tests at the endocrinologist confirmed that I had a “mild” case of hyperparathyroidism but that I didn’t need to do anything about it immediately, if ever; it all depended on symptoms. I didn’t know what, if any, symptoms I had, so I decided to dismiss the whole thing and focus on living, moving forward.

Brad was doing much better in school. Dr. B. was really helping to get him, and our family, back on track. Church choir and guitar lessons continued. There was too much running around, and I was feeling run down. We continued planning our remodel, but I had fired the architect and was researching an alternate plan.

After the New Year I got a stomach ache that wouldn’t go away. After a couple of weeks I called my oncologist, and she told me to get myself admitted to the emergency room in San Francisco. It sounded so easy, but arrangements had to be made, bills had to be paid, school applications had to be mailed or dropped off. Once that was done, I headed to the hospital, only to find that the ER was in full SARS contagion mode. Signs were up everywhere with instructions on hand washing, touching, coughing, sneezing. Some of the personnel were wearing masks and disposable gowns and booties over their clothes. When I saw a few people wearing goggles I wondered if coming to the hospital was more of a threat than the potential of recurring pancreatitis.

I was shown to a bed, and blood was taken. No, I didn’t know that my abdomen was rigid, hard as a board. There were the usual questions—no, no, no, yes, no. The ER physician assigned to my case came in and told Doug and me that my amylase and lipase, the pancreatic enzymes, were through the roof. The blood level of amylase was close to 4000 and lipase over 1800 (compared to normal levels in the low hundreds and under 100, respectively). They started an IV with a Dilaudid painkiller drip. Soon I started to feel better. Again, I wondered, was I so disconnected from my body that I could live with all this pain? Was the fear of finding out what was causing it worse than actually experiencing the pain?

They wanted to admit me but I soon learned that I would be under the care of a doctor in the medical service on rotation in gastroenterology, not my own doctor. Since I had a GI doctor at another hospital, I wanted to go there. I told the ER doctor that I was leaving and would arrange to have myself admitted to Stanford the next morning. I had Vicodin at home for the pain, and I assured him that I wouldn’t eat. The doctor and his staff looked at me with puzzlement. They said that with the enzyme levels as high as they were, the pancreatitis so severe, it would be dangerous for me to leave the hospital. Someone mentioned to Doug that it was likely that the pancreatic cancer had returned.

He was beside himself, but I knew that being there wasn’t what I needed to do. I had to sign a release that said that I was knowingly leaving the hospital against medical advice. And then we left.

At Stanford, I received the usual treatment for pancreatitis—no water, no food, no ice chips, only an IV with painkillers until the symptoms subsided. In the meantime, I had limited testing that revealed that indeed my pancreas was inflamed and the pancreatic duct was dilated. Again the doctor and his entourage hinted that the cancer had more than likely returned. Within the week I was discharged and a follow-up appointment scheduled in a couple of weeks with Dr. H.W.T., the surgeon, after some outpatient tests, including a PET-CT.

Why was I getting pancreatitis? Did I have a recurrence? Was it my diet? Was it drinking alcohol on New Year’s Eve? Were there microblockages in the ducts? The wheels started turning. I thought this was just a problem to be solved.

I knew I could easily remove any alcohol from my diet. I read somewhere that a high-fat diet was not good with hypercalcemia (high calcium) and would certainly cause the release of lipase from the pancreas. I decided that I could switch to a low-fat diet to help my pancreas. In fact, I soon became obsessed with my diet. I knew I didn’t get pancreatitis if I didn’t eat at all. I started to eat just vegetables, fruit, potatoes or rice, chicken, and fish.

After just a few days at home, my friends from church arranged another prayer circle—this time to pray for a miracle. It was imperative that this be done before the PET-CT so there would be nothing to see on the scan. My friends Lyn and Mary were there again. Doug came. There were also three other women, all of whom were extremely involved in the church.

We made a circle with seven metal folding chairs. We sat down and held hands. While we were led in general prayers by a woman named Martha, I closed my eyes and silently set my intention in prayers of petition that I would be cured of whatever was causing the pancreatitis. I offered prayers of gratitude for all the blessings in my life. While this was going on, the other people in the circle were praying fervently, and once again a few of them were transfixed and speaking in tongues. I soon found myself outside of my body leaving the room and walking up the center aisle of the church dappled in the soft golden afternoon sun. There were candles lit in addition to the paschal candle, which I thought was unusual since no one else was there. I laid myself on the floor before the altar, face down, arms spread. I raised my head and looked up. Somehow the altar disappeared and I was lying just before the large crucifix. I felt so humble. I gave my life to God and believed with all my heart and mind that I surrendered to God’s will and that was that. I opened my eyes and realized that I was still in the Heart of Immaculate Mary room off the lobby of the church with everyone else, tears streaming down my face.

After this powerful shared experience, the tears and the hugs, Martha handed Doug a large rock with “Seek The Truth” engraved in it. I felt a weight lifted.

After the PET-CT but before my appointment with Dr. H.W.T., I had an idea. I knew from earlier in the year that I possibly had hyperparathyroidism. The parathyroid glands, located in the neck, regulate the levels of calcium in the body. In hyperparathyroidism the levels are not regulated properly and there is too much calcium in the blood. In addition to causing osteoporosis, kidney stones, and heart disease, hyperparathyroidism causes headaches, fatigue, bone pain, depression, irritability, trouble with sleep, fogginess, forgetfulness and a low sex drive. Gee, I’d thought I was just dealing with cancer, chemo, surgery, my marriage and life!

I pulled together all the blood test results I had for the previous ten months and plotted a graph using colored pencils—blue for results in the normal range for the parathyroid hormone, green for elevated, red for elevated calcium, and turquoise for normal. From the graph I could see that the parathyroid hormone went up out of normal range and then, soon after, the calcium level went up. Comparing the graph to entries in my journals, I learned that as the calcium level went up so did my malaise and symptoms of pancreatitis. But I could not identify anything that would cause the parathyroid hormone levels to go up in the first place.

I brought my chart with me to the appointment with the surgeon.

“It is very unusual to see pancreatitis post-Whipple surgery,” he said. While almost jumping up and down like a 5-year-old saying Look, Look, I handed him my color-coded graph. He ordered an ultrasound of my parathyroid.

He called me later that week. “Well, Linda, it appears you may have an adenoma of the parathyroid, and this could be causing the fluctuations. I would like to order a sestamibi scan to take a better look.”

A sestamibi scan is a nuclear scan of the parathyroid glands. I soon found out that I had not one but two parathyroid adenomas, one on each side. An adenoma of the parathyroid gland is benign, but is a tumor. Still, a benign tumor was so much better than a recurrence of pancreatic cancer, and for that I was relieved.

“This finding is very unusual,” he told me at a subsequent appointment. “I’ll order a consult with the best chap for this sort of thing. He’s at UCSF.”

I thought I’d found the cause of pancreatitis, which may have been the precursor to pancreatic cancer, with my primitive charting. No matter, that was just my ego. With an otherwise negative PET-CT and a positive sestamibi scan, I was sent to yet another specialist, an endocrinology oncological surgeon. While waiting for this consultation, I thought back to the many stomach aches I’d had in childhood. Could I have had intermittent hyperparathyroidism, intermittent hypercalcemia, and intermittent pancreatitis ever since then?

Surgery to remove the tumors was scheduled for the end of June. In the middle of that month we headed down to Santa Barbara for Kim’s college graduation. Thanks to my new fat-restricted diet, I was now a size 2.

The first night we were there, we were invited to a special ceremony where Kim received a university service award. The dean of the school and several professors came over to greet us, singing the praises of Kim and how much she’d contributed to the school with her Women’s Safety Committee work and volunteer hours. Another joyfully related how much she loved having Kim in her class. It seemed—not that I’d ever doubted it—that Kim had really blossomed.

The next day was sunny and hot. The commencement exercises were held outdoors, in full sun. I started crying as soon as we got out of the car. Doug and Brad asked me what was wrong.

“I don’t know … nothing …” I said, and just started crying harder.

We found seats and waited while I kept wiping the tears away, blowing my nose using every manner and condition of paper product found in the depths of my purse.

The music started over the PA system, and the procession began. After half the seats were full, we could see Kim boasting a smile from a Christmas morning past and prancing in the procession sporting feather boas in all the colors of the rainbow.

What I released that day was twenty years of worry and hardship, and finally relief. I had lived to see the day that my daughter graduated with a college degree. I wondered whether I would live to see Brad do the same.

Within a week of the graduation, the parathyroid adenomas were removed. Other than waking up in the recovery room with a startle—suddenly returning from a free, expanded state and then being squeezed back into my body—the surgery was uneventful. Within a couple of weeks I started to feel like I had more energy and no longer felt the bone pain I hadn’t realized I had.

I didn’t have another occurrence of pancreatitis for many years.

Doug and I hired contractors to start a major remodel of our house beginning in September. At the meeting I was still wearing the post-
surgical bandage on my throat. I have no idea what the contractors thought might have happened to my neck.