A letter while you have surgery
on the hours after they first found the mass
A letter while you have surgery
Dear Phoenix,
It’s been forty-eight hours since you got admitted to the Hospital.
Right now, you are under anesthesia for a biopsy, a catheter, stents, a spinal tap, and the insertion of a central line port.
You’ve just had your first sleep medicine–this is what the nurses call anesthesia—because you have a mass, but we don’t know what kind yet. So that’s first on the list of things we need to find out.
The mass is massive, crowd-surfing on your bladder.
The Doctors didn’t realize how massive until they tried to insert the stents.
Like little line leaders telling everyone to get back in place, the stents will relieve the pressure on your bladder which will help out your kidneys.
It’s supposed to be a fifteen minute procedure.
It takes three hours.
It takes so long the Surgeon comes out mid-surgery to tell us you’re fine, in case we were worried.
He says your kidneys were doing a lot worse than they realized because the mass is pushing on your bladder so much. This also means you were in more pain than we realized because those kidneys were full of urine that couldn’t get through and once the stents were finally in, they started flushing right away.
When he shakes my hand, I press a golden ball of light into his palms so when he works on you, you can feel me.
Do you remember a few weeks ago, when our neighbors with the concrete walls all around their property were having a huge party and you convinced me to go dance in the alley?
You wore your Angry Bird onesie, and swung your light up poi balls like you were spinning planets. We boogeyed down in the gravel until you decided it was your right to crash the party. I had to beg you to stay with me, you were so determined to find a way in, as if you belonged, right there in the middle of it all.
I close my eyes and imagine the mass shrinking down- down and down, smaller and smaller, until it is a tiny pea, the smallest piece of gravel. No spreading. Then I take my magic wand and I imagine the four walls of your surgery room. I walk the perimeter, tracing each medical instrument, each blue glove, in white light. Then I take my wand and twirl it around the hearts of every nurse and every doctor, and I imagine them knowing what to do.
The Surgeon returns and tells us you have a malignant sarcoma.
He says this is good news, that sarcoma is treatable.
It had not occurred to me that you might have a cancer that was untreatable.
He tells us this means they need to put in a port, a door for all the medicine to go through. And that they will go ahead and do a bone marrow extraction to find out if you have cancer in your bones, and then you will be done and we can come in and see you.
All in all, surgery goes from 8:30 in the morning till 2:30 in the afternoon.
When they finally take us behind your curtain, your little face is swallowed by a breathing mask.
You look like a newborn baby surrounded by plastic and steel.
While Daddy strokes your hair and tells you how proud he is, I climb on your bed and rub your legs and hips.
I want to lick you back to life like a mama lion.
I want you to feel the warmth of my breath, the vibration of my voice, like you did in the womb.
I massage your feet with Frankincense for forty minutes while we sing you our family lullabies— “Loo, loo, That’s my Baby” and “The Moon is So Big.”
I squeeze your little stick arms up and down, like kneading dough, reminding you you’re here.
Through closed eyes, you tell us you’re thirsty. When the nurse comes to take the IV needle out of your hand, your eyes snap open and you sit up to try to reach for it.
When it’s time to go, they let me stay on your bed so we both get to ride down the hall like royalty, like we’re stars on the float in the parade.
Inside your room, I make a nest.
I soften the edges with the pink glow of salt lamps, place two paper and twig lanterns on the floor. Next to your bed, I line up the turquoise otter fetish from when I went to see Father Richard Rohr, a strip of Kyanite, a hunk of black tourmaline, another of malachite, and six clear stones to represent our family.
I play “A Beautiful Chorus,” the Resonance album, lullabies sung through chakras. Then I wrap my body around you and I breathe until your rhythm matches mine and you can sleep.
And when you sleep, I nuzzle the downy softness of your head.
My son–
you are feathers, brittle bones, and spark.