Upside Down

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.