Labor of Love.....

Finally, I’ve found a good reason to have jet-lag! It’s 2:30 AM, and I just helped my sister Julie throw up. There’s a tube in her nose that leads down to her stomach and sucks out all the bile, but sometimes it backs up and makes her nauseous. So my sister Marilyn, my brother-in-law Ron and I take turns doing puke patrol duty.

Julie’s a tough cookie. She is refusing to give in. She wants her records sent to the Mayo Clinic and to MD Anderson Cancer Center. Says she ain’t going out like no punk. Hey, if anybody can stick her foot up the Grim Reaper’s ass, it’s Julie. She’s already done it about 50 times in her life.

The good news is she’s not exactly on hospice care, ‘cause every night at 6, she gets a big old bag of milky glop, injected with her insulin and protein, to keep her nourished. It drips into tubing that flows into a port in her chest. Takes about 12 hours to empty out, and then you have to flush out the port with saline, and then shoot her up with some heparin, to thin her blood. My sister Marilyn says that if it was hospice care, they probably wouldn’t be feeding her. And she’d be on powerful painkillers, like Demerol or morphine. So far, she tried liquid oxycontin, but it gave her hallucinations and violent muscle cramps. We flushed that out of her system and now she’s coping with vicodin.

Julie is so tiny. Her arms and legs are like a Barbie doll’s. Her face is still just as round and smooth and beautiful as ever, though. Her skin is so clear and soft. And her hair is growing back in; it’s like a cloudy white buzz cut. I’ve always believed her hair would come back in fluffy and softer than it was before all the chemo. She’ll look like Fred Sanford…a really pretty, tiny Fred Sanford.

There’s not much else to say, except that I’ve finally figured out the meaning of life. The goal is to live a life that’s so full of love, you will be assured that someone will be there to hold your head and help you barf at the end of it. For Julie, it’s my pleasure.