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ElviraKrasFirstPaper 2 - 15 Oct 2014 - Main.ElviraKras
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< | My grandmother had “health” problems for as long as I can remember. These were problems that doctors could never diagnose and problems that my family eventually took as par for the course; her stomach frequently hurt and she had what I would now characterize as anxiety. About three years ago, doctors finally found something wrong, albeit unrelated to any symptoms she had suffered. She had a small, rare, benign, melanoma on her spinal cord. Over time the tumor began to grow aggressively, resulting in an operation that left my grandmother with slight paralysis in her left leg but was overall successful.
The summer after my second year of law school I was at her apartment when she asked me when I was getting married. This didn’t strike me as odd at first, seeing as how that is a common query from a Russian Jewish grandmother, but she persisted in a way that seemed particularly out of touch with reality. I can now connect the dots, but even weeks later when the hospital admitted her, I still didn’t grasp that she was sick.
That tumor had grown and was blocking fluid drainage from her brain. The fluid buildup had caused her strange behavior and would cause more physical problems if it wasn’t addressed. After weeks in the hospital, weeks full of seizures, brain surgeries, and a sort-of manageable uncertainty, my grandmother left the hospital with a shunt that drained fluid from her brain into her stomach along with some mild brain damage that manifested itself with marked confusion; but she was still my grandma. She recognized me. She retained those tokens of “selfhood” that made me characterize her as a unique and still vibrant human being.
I returned to law school. My parents didn’t fully tell me everything that was going on back home during that second year. After a visit home during winter break, I could tell that she was getting worse, but she was still her and for her, I was still me.
I had just bought a pistachio macaron at Columbus Circle when my mom called to tell me that my grandma had aggressive brain cancer. The doctors had only just discovered it and there was nothing they could do. It was such a shift in diagnosis. Adjusting from thinking of her as being alive but impaired, to someone who was going to die and going to die soon. At the point when I found out about her cancer, she was already very far-gone in the sense that she wasn’t really talking. She was bedridden and it was unclear how much she understood. Sometimes I wonder if she knew what was happening to her and if she was scared but couldn’t express it.
I couldn’t really communicate with her on the phone and then came a strange few weeks where there was this debate about whether I should come home and when. It was right before finals, so that was a convenient excuse for everyone to keep me from bearing witness. If I hadn’t been so afraid to confront what was happening, I probably would have gone home sooner.
Nonetheless, I waited and I took my finals. I had some interesting interactions with the registrar’s office when it became necessary for me to go home, but finally I was there. What struck me the most when I finally saw her was that she didn’t seem human anymore. I got the distinct sense that the cancer was eating her. She was so skinny. She wasn’t getting nutrients, just morphine to ease her pain. She just slept. I remember thinking that given the way she was then there would be no difference once she died, but even that body I could touch or look at was a comfort that I took for granted. I don’t know if she was aware of what was going on around her. I held her hand and she squeezed it but I don’t know to what degree that was a reflex.
That uncertainty and lack of control is what I hate most. I hate that she became a body before she was even a corpse, with people changing her diaper and examining her body at will, and fighting in the apartment where she was dying and not letting her retain any dignity in that death. For myself, I struggle with understanding and accepting how someone I loved and someone who at one point was so alive, with her vibrant red hair, how they could deteriorate like that.
The doctors had given her a few days to live, but she had surprised everyone by holding on for weeks past what anyone expected. My family agreed that she didn’t want me there when she passed and sure enough the day I returned back to New York is when she let go. That night I had a dream where we were in her apartment and she was healthy and she was actually pregnant. Then she held my hand and walked up a flight of stairs. I was the only one in my family who dreamed about her that night and I think that was her saying goodbye to me.
But I can’t say goodbye. I am plagued by nightmares where I will see her and we will be doing something that we enjoyed doing together, like taking a walk in her neighborhood, and then she will suddenly get sick and start dying and I will feel desperate, screaming, waking up utterly panicked, and feeling sick, and feeling sad. Sad because again she was so close and so alive and sad because she is gone and I just had to relive it again. I want to be able to remember the grandmother who raised me, and who fed me, and who loved me, and right now all I can remember is the disease that killed her and the shock and horror of her death.
-- ElviraKras - 06 Mar 2014
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ElviraKrasFirstPaper 1 - 06 Mar 2014 - Main.ElviraKras
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My grandmother had “health” problems for as long as I can remember. These were problems that doctors could never diagnose and problems that my family eventually took as par for the course; her stomach frequently hurt and she had what I would now characterize as anxiety. About three years ago, doctors finally found something wrong, albeit unrelated to any symptoms she had suffered. She had a small, rare, benign, melanoma on her spinal cord. Over time the tumor began to grow aggressively, resulting in an operation that left my grandmother with slight paralysis in her left leg but was overall successful.
The summer after my second year of law school I was at her apartment when she asked me when I was getting married. This didn’t strike me as odd at first, seeing as how that is a common query from a Russian Jewish grandmother, but she persisted in a way that seemed particularly out of touch with reality. I can now connect the dots, but even weeks later when the hospital admitted her, I still didn’t grasp that she was sick.
That tumor had grown and was blocking fluid drainage from her brain. The fluid buildup had caused her strange behavior and would cause more physical problems if it wasn’t addressed. After weeks in the hospital, weeks full of seizures, brain surgeries, and a sort-of manageable uncertainty, my grandmother left the hospital with a shunt that drained fluid from her brain into her stomach along with some mild brain damage that manifested itself with marked confusion; but she was still my grandma. She recognized me. She retained those tokens of “selfhood” that made me characterize her as a unique and still vibrant human being.
I returned to law school. My parents didn’t fully tell me everything that was going on back home during that second year. After a visit home during winter break, I could tell that she was getting worse, but she was still her and for her, I was still me.
I had just bought a pistachio macaron at Columbus Circle when my mom called to tell me that my grandma had aggressive brain cancer. The doctors had only just discovered it and there was nothing they could do. It was such a shift in diagnosis. Adjusting from thinking of her as being alive but impaired, to someone who was going to die and going to die soon. At the point when I found out about her cancer, she was already very far-gone in the sense that she wasn’t really talking. She was bedridden and it was unclear how much she understood. Sometimes I wonder if she knew what was happening to her and if she was scared but couldn’t express it.
I couldn’t really communicate with her on the phone and then came a strange few weeks where there was this debate about whether I should come home and when. It was right before finals, so that was a convenient excuse for everyone to keep me from bearing witness. If I hadn’t been so afraid to confront what was happening, I probably would have gone home sooner.
Nonetheless, I waited and I took my finals. I had some interesting interactions with the registrar’s office when it became necessary for me to go home, but finally I was there. What struck me the most when I finally saw her was that she didn’t seem human anymore. I got the distinct sense that the cancer was eating her. She was so skinny. She wasn’t getting nutrients, just morphine to ease her pain. She just slept. I remember thinking that given the way she was then there would be no difference once she died, but even that body I could touch or look at was a comfort that I took for granted. I don’t know if she was aware of what was going on around her. I held her hand and she squeezed it but I don’t know to what degree that was a reflex.
That uncertainty and lack of control is what I hate most. I hate that she became a body before she was even a corpse, with people changing her diaper and examining her body at will, and fighting in the apartment where she was dying and not letting her retain any dignity in that death. For myself, I struggle with understanding and accepting how someone I loved and someone who at one point was so alive, with her vibrant red hair, how they could deteriorate like that.
The doctors had given her a few days to live, but she had surprised everyone by holding on for weeks past what anyone expected. My family agreed that she didn’t want me there when she passed and sure enough the day I returned back to New York is when she let go. That night I had a dream where we were in her apartment and she was healthy and she was actually pregnant. Then she held my hand and walked up a flight of stairs. I was the only one in my family who dreamed about her that night and I think that was her saying goodbye to me.
But I can’t say goodbye. I am plagued by nightmares where I will see her and we will be doing something that we enjoyed doing together, like taking a walk in her neighborhood, and then she will suddenly get sick and start dying and I will feel desperate, screaming, waking up utterly panicked, and feeling sick, and feeling sad. Sad because again she was so close and so alive and sad because she is gone and I just had to relive it again. I want to be able to remember the grandmother who raised me, and who fed me, and who loved me, and right now all I can remember is the disease that killed her and the shock and horror of her death.
-- ElviraKras - 06 Mar 2014
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