My Beautiful Mess

I had a hard time starting the first grade. Being the first-born of a stay-at-home mom, I was not use to being gone all day from home. It was hard for me to make it through a full day at school without crying at some point. I would wake up and feel sick to my stomach and would hope that Mom would not make me go today. After a month or more of this, my parents started to really worry. It was Dad who came up with a plan that, I am assuming, he likely felt was a shot-in-the-dark. But it worked.

He gave me a silver dollar. He called it my magic coin. I was to keep it in my pocket and then hold it when I felt sad. It would make me not miss home so much. And by golly, that is exactly what it did. I took it to school everyday and eventually, I wasn’t so sad.

When Dad went in for his surgery on November 5, 2008, I decided to return the favor. I found two silver dollars, one from the year in which I was born and another from the year in which my brother was born. I took those to the hospital in Texas and gave them to Dad the morning of his surgery, hoping that he wouldn’t feel as scared if he had them. He looked at the coins, looked at me, and with tears in his eyes said, “You must be my daughter.” Behind him, his wife was pulling a purple bag out of her purse. Inside of it? Two coins. A Texas quarter and an Oklahoma quarter.

Oh, how tightly I held onto the coins during the surgery, during his two hospital stays, and during his memorial service. And now they sit on my night stand, reminding me that Dad is still waiting for me to come Home…

So by Wednesday evening, Dad and my step-mom had talked with the GI doc who was planning on doing an endoscopy the next day to try to unblock a bile duct. This blockage was what was causing the jaundice and the weight loss. No bile to your stomach means no “juice” to digest your food properly and so then the bile goes into your system, turning you yellow (just fyi, jaundice in newborns is totally different). And, yes, there was discussion as to “what” might be blocking this duct, but of course we all remained hopeful that it would be a quick and easy procedure.

The next day was my youngest son’s birthday, and a work-day for me. But Dad was constantly on my mind. If I am remembering right, the procedure was to be done at 1:00 pm so I was expecting to hear from my step-mom shortly after 2:00 pm. When 5:00 pm began to approach and my little family was preparing to go celebrate birthday, I called my step-mom.

Hey, it’s Jenn, I say. Amidst tears is the reply, I know.

The GI doc had run into a hard mass and couldn’t even get to the bile duct. He said that 9 times out of 10, this was pancreatic cancer.

The next step was to talk to a surgeon. One thing I still don’t get is that they were going to have to totally open Dad up to get a complete picture of what was going on - was it cancer, had it spread, what organs were involved - we would know none of that until they opened him up.  The best surgeon to do the procedure (a whipple) would do surgery on November 5th. So on Halloween, they sent him home. I told Dad that the jaundice at least made for a good Halloween costume!!

You have to laugh - or you’ll just end up in sobbing heap on the floor.