Authors: Anita Moorjani
Dying to Be Me (10 page)
If this is retribution for something I did in a previous life,
I wondered,
how can I change it? What can I possibly do about it now?
Thoughts like this would leave me feeling completely hopeless about my situation.
But through all this, I put up a front. I laughed and smiled and made small talk, even when I didn’t want to, because it was important to me not to cause concern or worry anyone else with my condition. I didn’t want others to feel upset or uncomfortable because of my situation, so I continued to put the feelings and needs of everyone else before my own. So many people remarked on how “brave” I was, and how they admired the way I was dealing with my illness. Many, many individuals also commented on how positive and happy I always was—but that’s not how I felt inside.
Danny was the only person who really understood what was going on and how much being around other people took a toll on me, so he slowly began acting as a protective shell around me, shutting people out. In the presence of others, I always felt the need to perform at being happy and positive, because I never wanted anyone to feel bad for me, nor did I want them to worry. Eventually, this started to really drain me, and I wouldn’t even answer the phone because I didn’t want to talk about my illness, I didn’t want anybody’s advice on how to handle what was going on inside me, and I didn’t want to repeatedly answer the endless questions that people who care tend to ask.
I stopped going out and stayed in the safety of my own home, because apart from feeling unwell, I physically appeared very sick. My breathing was labored; my limbs were very, very thin; and I had difficulty holding my head up. The looks and comments I got because of this bothered me. I knew that people weren’t staring at me out of contempt or displeasure, but rather out of curiosity and, perhaps, a sense of pity. When I caught them looking, they shifted their eyes away abruptly, and I sensed their discomfort. I recognized the emotion behind their expressions, as I’d often felt it myself when seeing someone who was ill. They felt sorry for me. I soon came to accept that reaction as the norm from people who saw or interacted with me, and
I
felt sorry that my presence made others feel so uncomfortable, so at this point I stopped going out in public altogether.
Soon, I found myself locked in my own cage of fear and desperation, where my experience of life was getting smaller and smaller. Time slid by in a slippery descent. To me, anyone who didn’t have cancer was lucky. I envied every healthy person I met. It didn’t matter what their living conditions were; they were without the fiend that was relentlessly plundering my body…my mind…my life.
Each morning, I woke up with a glimmer of hope:
Today may just be the day that things turn around.
But each evening would end with the familiar, heavy feeling, every night bringing a greater sense of defeat than the day before.
Disillusioned, I started to question what I was fighting so hard to keep. What did it all mean anyway? In my pain and fear, I could no longer see the purpose in continuing, and I felt myself getting tired. I was beginning to give up. I was getting ready to admit that I was beaten.
B
Y THIS TIME,
I
WAS GOING IN AND OUT OF THE HOSPITAL
for blood transfusions and other treatments. When I was at home, I spent most of my days sleeping or resting. I couldn’t go out or walk around for prolonged periods of time. Just half an hour of activity left me tired and out of breath. I was losing weight fast and perpetually running a low-grade fever.
“
Do you think my condition can still improve at this stage?” I asked my doctor one day, immediately after he’d finished conducting a routine body scan to assess my situation.
He averted his eyes as he said, “I’ll send the nurse in to help you get dressed.” What he didn’t tell me was that he wanted to talk to Danny in private.
“There’s little we can do now,” the doctor told him once they were safely outside. He looked directly at my husband and continued, “She has about three months to live at best. The latest scans show that the tumors have grown and increased in number, and the cancer has spread quite aggressively throughout her lymphatic system. It’s too late even for chemotherapy—her body can’t handle the toxicity at this stage. She’s so weak that any treatment now will just weaken her further and bring her closer to death. I’m so sorry.”
Although Danny put on a brave front and didn’t tell me what the doctor had said at that time (he shared it with me many months later), I could tell something wasn’t right. At that point, he’d barely been going to work, but from the day of that doctor’s visit, he stopped going in altogether. He seemed reluctant to ever leave my side.
One day, I asked him, “Am I going to die?”
“We’re all going to die sometime,” he said.
“I know that, silly,” I countered. “I mean now, because of the cancer. What if I die?”
“Then I’m going to come and get you, and bring you back,” he responded gently, stroking my head as I lay on the bed.
This was about six weeks after the last meeting with the doctor. By now, breathing had become a labored task, and an oxygen tank was my permanent companion. I couldn’t lie down, needing to be propped up at all times to keep from drowning in my own fluids. Every time I tried to lie flat, I started choking and had difficulty breathing, so changing my position in bed became an impossible task. My body broke out in lesions all over. So many toxins had invaded my system that my skin was forced to open and release the poisons within.
Many times I woke up in a heavy sweat, my clothes soaked through—night sweats being a common symptom of lymphoma. Often, my skin itched all over, as though ants were crawling all over me. I recall one night when the itching was so strong that no matter how much I scratched myself, it wouldn’t subside. Danny got ice cubes from the freezer and put them into ziplock bags, and we rubbed these ice packs all over my legs, arms, and body in order to soothe my inflamed skin. It took a long time, but the itchiness finally subsided.
Most of our nights were sleepless, and by this point I was completely dependent on Danny to care for me. He anticipated my every need before it arose. He dressed my wounds and helped me wash my hair. Although I felt guilty about him having to spend his days caring for me in this way, I knew that he never, ever acted out of obligation, duty, or responsibility. Everything he did sprang from pure love for me.
My digestive system eventually stopped absorbing nutrients from the food I was eating, so I became malnourished. Danny bought my favorite chocolates, and my mother prepared some of my favorite foods to try to get me to eat, but I had no appetite. I wasn’t absorbing whatever I did manage to choke down, and I watched my muscles disintegrate until I could no longer walk. My mobility then came in the form of a wheelchair. My body started to consume the protein from my own flesh to survive, until I looked like a poster child from a famine-struck nation. I became a skeleton of my old self, and my head felt like a 300-pound barbell that I could barely lift from the pillow.
I was still going in and out of the hospital, but every time I was there, I always wanted to leave as quickly as possible and be home. I felt those institutions were cold, clinical, and depressing, and they seemed to make me feel even sicker than I already was. So we hired a nurse to stay with me during the day.
Both my mother and my husband never left my side during those days, and Danny sat up with me through the night. He wanted to make sure that I continued to breathe, and to be there just in case I was taking my last breath. Many nights I wasn’t able to sleep for coughing, so I was always grateful for his comforting presence. But I was also acutely aware of his pain, and that made it so much harder for me to endure my situation. Even through all of this, I continued to put on a brave front, and kept assuring everyone that I wasn’t in pain. I told them that I was feeling fine even though that was so far from the truth!
At the same time, I was also aware of my mother’s anguish. I knew that no mother should watch her child go before her, let alone witness her child’s slow and painful disintegration.
O
N THE MORNING OF
F
EBRUARY
1, 2006, I was feeling more positive than usual. I actually started to notice things around me. The sky looked bluer than normal, and the world seemed like a beautiful place. Although still wheelchair-bound, my oxygen tank as my constant companion, I was wheeled home from the clinic with a feeling that it was okay to let go now, that everything was going to be fine.
The world won’t stop if I’m not in it. I have nothing to worry about. I don’t understand why, but I’m feeling emotionally good. Better than I’ve felt in a long time,
I recall thinking.
My body ached, and my breathing was difficult and labored, so I went to bed. Because I was in pain all over and couldn’t sleep, the nurse administered morphine just before she left at the end of the day so that I could get some rest. But something was different. I could feel myself relaxing and letting go of the strong grip with which I’d been clinging to life. All that time, it was as though I’d been hanging from the edge of a cliff. I’d been fighting a losing battle, struggling to hold on. I was finally ready to let go of everything that I’d been gripping so tightly. I felt myself sink into a deep sleep.
The following morning, February 2, I didn’t open my eyes. Apparently, my face was grossly swollen. So were my arms, legs, hands, and feet. Danny took one look at me and called the doctor, who directed him to rush me to the hospital.
I was about to end my battle with cancer.
As I was being rushed to the hospital, the world around me started to appear surreal and dreamlike, and I could feel myself slip further and further away from consciousness. I arrived at the hospital in a coma, only to find that the doctors were bleak—if not hopeless—in their evaluation of my chances. This wasn’t the same place where I’d usually visited for my treatments throughout the duration of my illness. The facility I’d been going to over the years was more like a large clinic than a full-blown hospital. It had been adequate for what my doctor prescribed in the past, but it wasn’t equipped to deal with medical emergencies. It was my choice all along to be treated at the smaller neighborhood institution because it was less intimidating—and I absolutely hated hospitals. I feared them because of the two people I’d lost. My best friend and Danny’s brother-in-law both died in large, cancer-specialist hospitals.
But when Danny called the clinic the morning I fell into a coma, my doctor told him to rush me to one of the largest and best-equipped hospitals in Hong Kong, where the doctor would have a team of specialists waiting for me. So this was the first time I was in this particular place and the first time I was being treated by this particular medical team
The moment the oncologist saw me, her face visibly filled with shock.
“Your wife’s heart may still be beating,” she told Danny, “but she’s not really in there. It’s too late to save her.”
Who’s the doctor talking about?
I wondered.
I’ve never felt better in my life! And why do Mum and Danny look so frightened and worried? Mum, please don’t cry. What’s wrong? Are you crying because of me? Don’t cry! I’m fine—really, dear Mama, I am!
I thought I was speaking these words aloud, but nothing came out. I had no voice.
I wanted to hug my mother, comfort her and tell her that I was fine; and I couldn’t comprehend why I was unable to do so. Why was my physical body not cooperating? Why was I just lying there, limp, when all I wanted to do was to hug my beloved husband and mother, assuring them that I was fine and no longer in pain?
Because of the gravity of the situation, the doctor immediately called for another senior oncologist to back her up. In this near-death state, I was more acutely aware of all that was going on around me than I’ve ever been in a normal physical state. I wasn’t using my five biological senses, yet I was keenly taking everything in, much more so than if I’d been using my physical organs. It was as though another, completely different type of perception kicked in, and more than just
perceive
, I seemed to also encompass everything that was happening, as though I was slowly
merging
with it all.