Last Friday, my father was diagnosed with bladder cancer. On
Monday, he had surgery to remove a significant tumour and two smaller growths.
Also, on Monday, I became a grown-up. Since I have yet to properly introduce
myself on this blog, I should probably confess that I am, in fact, an adult.
I'm a 34 year old woman with three kids. Two of those kids are starting
kindergarten in the fall. I've been married for almost nine years. I have two
university degrees, a home, and a minivan. The minivan alone should be a
testament to my adulthood, but somehow, up until last week, I still felt like I
would be perpetually stuck in some kind of teenage limbo. And then last Friday,
I got an hysterical phone call from my mother telling me that my father had a
malignant growth on his bladder lining. A stressful weekend followed in which
my mother was unable to maintain her composure, even for a few minutes, and my
father walked around looking like a ghost of his former self. Until he had
surgery, until a biopsy was performed and the results returned from pathology,
we wouldn't really have any idea how advanced the cancer was. The surgery was
supposed to be a relatively quick and simple proceudre. My father would have a
spinal, and the surgeon would use a cytoscope to locate and
cauterize the dangerous lesions. The whole thing was supposed to take 30
minutes, and he would be released from the hospital, with a catheter, after his
spinal wore off. I sat with my mother in the waiting room and watched her fear
rise when the half-hour mark came and went. After an hour, she was in full
panic mode and after 90 minutes, there was no way to assure her that these
things sometimes took more time than originally planned. When the surgeon
finally emerged from the operating room 15 minutes later, she was convinced
that he had terrible news and could barely bring herself to listen to his
explanation. By the time we got to my father in the recovery room, she was in full-blown
hysterics. And then my father began to cry. In my 34 years, I have never once
seen my father cry. Not at my wedding, not at the births of his grandchildren,
not even at his father's funeral. I know he was in terrible pain. His bladder
was in total spasm and he had just awoken from general anesthetic after he had
expected an epidural. The whole thing, from diagnosis to surgery, had happened
extraordinarily quickly. He had reason to cry, for sure. And at that moment, as
I feebly tried to soothe my father and calm my mother, I felt a million years
old. I knew that I would feel like a grown-up one day. I expected that as my
parents grew older, our roles would shift and merge and finally reverse. In a
very long time from now, I would have to parent my parents. I just wasn't ready
for it to happen yet.
