Journal Theme: Fear and Right Action

From the journal of Maddy Sisson:

“It started with a hacking cough and the sniffles.

…

Then, two weeks later, I caught him coughing a wad of blood-stained phlegm into the toilet.

‘How long have you been doing that?’ I [Amir] said.

‘What’s for dinner?’ he [Baba] said.

‘I’m taking you to the doctor.’

…

He [the doctor] gave me a quick glance. Pushed up his glasses. Began scribbling again. ‘He’s got a spot on his right lung. I want them to check it out.’

‘A spot?’ I said, the room suddenly too small.

‘Cancer?’ Baba added casually.

‘Possible. It’s suspicious, anyway,” the doctor muttered.

…

Dr. Amanim, soft-spoken man with a crooked mustache and a mane of gray hair, told us he had reviewed the CAT scan results and that he would have to perform a procedure called a bronchoscopy to get a piece of the lung mass for pathology. He scheduled it for the following week. I thanked him as I helped Baba out of the office, thinking that now I had to live a whole week with this new word, ‘mass,’ an even more ominous word than ‘suspicious.’

…

It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names. Baba’s was called ‘Oat Cell Carcinoma.’ …’There is a chemotherapy, or course,’ he [Dr. Amanim] said. ‘But it would only be palliative.’

‘What does that mean?’ Baba asked.

Dr. Amani sighed. ‘It means it wouldn’t change the outcome, just prolong it.’

‘That’s a clear answer, Dr. Amani. Thank you for that,’ Baba said. ‘But no chemo medication for me.’ He had the same resolved look on his face as the day he’d dropped the stack of food stamps on Mrs. Dobbins’s Desk.

‘But Baba-’

‘Don’t you challenge me in public, Amir. Ever. Who do you think you are?’

...

Baba lit a cigarette. He smoked all the way to the car and all the way home.

As he was slipping the key into the lobby door, I said, ‘I wish you’d give the chemo a chance, Baba.’

Baba pocketed the keys pulled me out of the rain and under the building’s striped awning. He kneaded me on the chest with the hand holding the cigarette, ‘Bas! I’ve made my decision.’

‘What about me, Baba? What am I supposed to do?’ I said, my eyes welling up. “

- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini pgs. 153-155

~~~

I was at the age of five when my mother was diagnosed with a chronic disease known as Crohn’s Disease. Crohn’s Disease is inflammation of the colon and digestive tract, and causes nausea, bleeding of the colon, and an overall feeling of constant fatigue. The first few years after her diagnosis, she was able to keep her symptoms under control through the use of steroids and antidepressants, but these remedies didn’t keep the disease at bay for long.

When I was about nine, my mother suffered a horrible spell of sickness, caused by an extremely high level of stress. She would no longer eat for fear of not holding it in or down, she constantly slept due to fatigue, and she barely spoke because of the awful nausea she felt. As her symptoms were doubling in strength, she was doubling in weakness. In short my mother was hospitalized for approximately a week and a half, lost and replaced two pints of blood, and was prescribed a experimental treatment, Humira. Humira is a vaccine given to the patient every other week (my father would inject my mother with this burning sensation every other Thursday), and at the time, was still being tested and tweaked, and like most experimental treatments it had no guarantee to work on helping suppress the symptoms caused by my mom’s disease. Humira had plenty of side-effects of its own though including: psoriasis, joint pain, drowsiness/fatigue in between doses, and eventual immunity to the medication. When my mother was faced with this immune state in her treatments, her doctor suggested a new medication, but my mother refused to take it. She no longer wanted to be poked and injected with a liquid that seared her veins, she no longer wanted to rely on medications that worked but would one day hit a state of immunity, she refused steroids and vaccines. Her refusal filled me with fear and I was questioning if what my mother was doing was right.

The last time that she stopped taking medication due to immunity, she was hospitalized because of high bouts of stress, and my father was set to deploy in the coming months, was it right for her to test fate and risk becoming fatally ill again with the stress that always follows a deployment of a family member? Those months leading up to my father leaving filled me with fear and anxiety caused by my mother’s decision. A decision that I did not feel was ethical, considering the risks that came along with it, but one that I understood, because it was painful to watch her take medications and for her to rely on them as a form of life support. The scene above taken from The Kite Runner shares a similar story. Baba, much like my own mother, did not want to be treated for an illness, and that decision was as scary to Amir as it was to me. Much like Amir, I was questioning my mother’s ethics in her decision, and I asked myself the same question that Amir asked his father, “What about me…? What am I supposed to do?”

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