| A Bird, Piles of Garbage and the Power of Prayer, Part 1 |
| Written by Kory D | ||||||||
| Thursday, 04 November 2010 03:02 | ||||||||
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My brother called me that day. He told me that they checked my dad into the hospital. He had not been well. He was suffering from increasing back pain that his doctor diagnosed as arthritis. Now it appeared that it was much more serious than that: cancer had attacked his spine. There was a real chance that he was going to get paralyzed from the waist down as the disease progressed. This was not the first time that one of our parents was diagnosed with something like this. My mom developed breast cancer less than a decade earlier. While that was nothing short of horrible, somewhere deep down I had a feeling that she was going to pull through, which she did. We have a saying where I come from: ‘lightning won’t strike poison ivy’, which means that if you are tough enough trouble will just avoid you. I always thought about her that way. I mean there was no way she was going to make it into haven, and sure as heck that hell wasn’t going to put up with her. It was different this time. Something told me that this was going to be it for my dad. In 100 days, he was gone. I remember leaving the hospice that night where he had stayed and noticing a full moon hovering over the building. I considered it an auspicious sign, a worthy signal to the end of the gripping but, at the same time, wonderful journey that he and I were on together for little over three months. While my mom and my two brothers did everything they could, I was the one with the time to spare and the strength to lift him in-and-out of the wheelchair. We grew really close together, perhaps closer than we have ever been before. But you know what they say: when it rains, it pours. A month or so later, I was already preparing to return to the good ol’ U.S.A. to resume my life here, when a routine checkup revealed a mass in my bladder. When the results of the biopsy came back, they told me I had cancer. To make matters worse, it was an extremely rare form of bladder cancer, one that does not respond to chemotherapy or radiation and has been known to spread quickly. To me, it made all the sense in the world. The first two weeks after my father’s passing were too horrible to put into words. Then something happened: the pain subsided considerably, unnaturally so. I thought that in an effort to cope with his loss, I swept it under the rug, so to speak. I was certain that that’s why I got cancer.
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