It was almost a year ago as I write this. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of the last chapter of Jack’s cancer story. Early winter we got the good news that there was no detectable sarcoma in his last whole-body PET. “But,” the PA said, “There’s something going on in your brain. We’ll see. Dr. Robinson may not even be worried about it.” But when we got home from UC after the two-hour drive, the PA’s voice was on our answering machine. “Dr. Robinson definitely wants an MRI of Jack’s brain. We’ve started the paperwork.”

January and February of 2018 I watched Jack like a hawk. I made him smile at me to check to see if he’d had a stroke. He perfected a patient, sarcastic smile for the occasion. I tailed him on his frequent walks around the perimeter of our seven-acre compound. I watched him do his daily chores and knew something was wrong, but couldn’t put my finger on it. In so many ways he was acting like his normal self. But he was more isolated, darker, more remote.

We waited and waited for the approval of the MRI.

Then in early March, a blizzard came to the Grade. Feet fell in just hours. Jack went out to turn the generator off for the night, and announced when he came in, “I turned the dogs off.”

“What did you say?” I queried, thinking he was joking.

“I said I turned the dogs off,” he repeated.

“Do you mean you turned the generator off?” I asked, guarded.

He was losing patience. “Yes! I turned the dogs off.”

I slipped into my office and dialed the on-call oncologist at U.C. “He should get to the emergency room right away.”

I stole a look at Jack in the living room, calmly watching t.v. He seemed fine except for the dog-instead-of-generator thing. And then there was the blizzard. I asked what would happen if I waited until morning.

“The consequences could be dire,” the doctor stated. So I dialed 911 for the first of several times that year.

Up here on the San Juan Ridge, we are known to have a fantastic fire department and dedicated, heroic first responders. A few feet of snow wouldn’t stop them. Soon they were wading through three feet of powder, calling to me since it’s not at all clear from that direction how to get into our little cabin.

Jack had announced after I called that he was going to bed. This was hours before he usually went to bed, and probably why he said, “I really am!” in a most uncharacteristic tone. He was awakened by me and two first responders. He didn’t like it one bit and immediately refused treatment. The responders and I went out to the living room and discussed the predicament. “I will have to call law enforcement if he doesn’t change his mind,” the man said and went back down to call somebody about something on his radio. The woman remained with me, and I remembered that it was protocol to ask the person questions in this situation. We went back in the bedroom.

“What year is it?” she asked.

He rolled his eyes. “1980.”

“Who’s president?”

“Ronald Reagan,” he answered as if she were the dumbest girl on the planet.

I felt a rock grow instantly in my gut. I’d had no idea.

“Who’s she?” the woman gestured toward me.

“That’s my wife, Carolyn,” he said, suddenly smiling. I felt so special at that moment. I was a time-traveler in his brain. I was indelible.

We got him to the living room. Rich the medic (and also my neighbor) was there by then, and paramedics came. Jack was refusing transport. He said he was fine. He was also beginning to hallucinate, pulling imaginary feathers out of the air.

“Jack, I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure you’re fine. But could you just humor me and go to the ER for a little scan to be sure?” It was worth a shot.

He looked at me with tenderness and a resigned quality. “Okay,” he said a little grudgingly.

There was a flurry of discussion then about the snowmobile. He couldn’t walk out, so Jason the fire chief (who was there by this time) made tracks in the snowmobile around the house. Jack liked the idea of the ride, even under the circumstances.

“I’ll take him and come back to get her,” he motioned to me.

“I can walk out,” I said, thinking proudly of my two new hips.

We waded through the snow to the ambulance waiting on our road. We had to leave the dogs, but I was in such a daze I just accepted that. The four-wheel drive ambulance was waiting with many other vehicles, so many flashing red lights on a snowy silent Cruzon Grade. It took us a half hour or more to drive the eight miles to North Columbia, to our friend’s ranch which I saw was the staging area for our emergency. I looked into their dark windows from the front seat of the ambulance, wondering when they would find out that all the commotion was about us. We dechained and parted from the fire department crews. We had to take a detour up Oak Tree Road since Tyler Foote Crossing Road was blocked by a tree.

All in all, the rescue took four hours, when the drive to the hospital was usually less than one. It was in the ER we met Milan, RN, who whispered to me that the CT scan “wasn’t pretty” and she “hoped we had a nice week together last week.” I had a 33-gallon garbage bag full of our snow boots, jackets, and gloves. We were fast-tracked to transport for UC, but the ambulance driver said I couldn’t come. There just wasn’t room.

“I have to come,” I said, more demanding than I usually am. “My car is snowed in, and I have no other way to get down there.”  That seemed to have no effect. “Can you send another ambulance, one with room for me?” I suggested. That was a negative.

“Well, I will take him to a motel for the night and rent a car in the morning, then,” I said, not backing down. “I’ll get him to UC myself.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” he said. He crossed his arms and we seemed at an impasse.

I thought of another angle. “He’s delusional. Something is wrong with his brain. He needs an advocate at all times.”

Milan appeared again, as if on cue, and asked to speak to the driver in the hall.  He returned in a moment,  his tune changed. Suddenly there was room.

I watched the sun come up in the side rear view mirror of the ambulance as we neared UC Med. I saw the red hues but felt no warmth. Jack was a few feet behind me behind the metal wall of the ambulance, but he was silent and felt far away.

Forty-eight hours later, a kind surgeon named Dr. Girgis removed the tumor from Jack’s frontal lobe. He came to find me in the waiting room.  “I got it all,” he said, smiling through fatigue. “He’s been through a lot. It was quite large.”

“How large?”  I asked, picturing a golf ball.

“It was the size of an orange,” he said, his eyes getting moist. “We’ll see how he is when he wakes up.”

An orange?  An orange?

Jack woke up happy and lucid, sure that the cancer was gone.

Except for breakfast before his surgery, he hadn’t missed a meal.

 

We were home two days later to the dogs and the snow drifts. My youngest son, Jesse, had come back home to help me. He had shoveled paths and had the house warm for us. Little did any of us know what we were in for that year, or that Jack would only be with us for eight more months.

Our evacuation made the news on YubaNet.

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Friends have been helping Carolyn pay off medical debt. She has about $10,000 left. If you can help, here is the link to the GoFundMe.