stage four ovaria/complex ptsd

note: this post was originally from our stillness, a now defunct blogging project.

Our odds have slightly improved. It's not pancreatic cancer, which is almost always terminal. It's ovarian, which is less terminal. She has a tumor the size of a chicken’s egg resting in her abdomen, and that cancer has metastasized into her lungs. Apparently, that doesn’t kill someone as much as a tumor the size of an almond in the pancreas.

I don't know if I am lucky. I don't want to think of anything that happens to me in terms of luck—if I did, I'd convince myself that I've been experiencing unceasing misfortune, which would make me feel more helpless than if I thought I was experiencing life. There’s nothing unjust about what’s happening to me. It’s just anarchic.

My mom speaks with an almost defiant sense of acceptance. “No one wants to have a disease,” she said. “But once you do, you have to accept it. And face it. And fight it.” She’s been putting my hand in a death grip to show me that she still has her strength. And then, she would let go of my hand to take a small bite of a piece of chocolate that I’d been watching her work on since the week prior.

I started going to therapy to begin coping with her loss, but I learned that I was becoming her instead. My therapist implied that I was exhibiting trauma-born behavior that I likely picked up from my parents. Psychodynamic therapy.

I don’t want to talk about how she emotionally abused me. I want to talk about how she’s the only person in my family who knows that I am struggling to find work because she’s been the only person in my family who has shown me patience and forgiveness with my career. I want to talk about how she only speaks English now because no one in the hospital knows Cantonese. I want to talk about how she wants to cut down the mandarin tree she planted for me when I was a kid because no one’s been eating the mandarins since I moved out and she’s too weak to care for her garden now. I want to talk about how hospital nurses have probably never heard someone beg so pathetically to keep a tree alive.

I’ve been driving back home sobbing these nights. One night while struggling to find parking in my neighborhood, I happened upon a man leaving his spot. I thanked him as he left, and with a raised hand, he said,

“You got lucky.”