Is This a Hero’s Journey?

Count All This — Chapter 23: Orientation

Just when Jo Kasten’s son encounters schizophrenia, she discovers she has breast cancer. Meanwhile, her marriage faces a test. Count All This is a story about love and loyalty, addiction and madness. This is the twenty-third chapter. Find the first chapter here.

I didn’t sleep much the night we found Eddy acting crazy in a faraway town, despite being fully exhausted. I worried about Eddy. I worried about my surgery. And I thought about a handout Michael had brought home from school called “The Hero’s Journey” that listed a dozen movies and claimed they all had the same plot.

Was I on a “hero’s journey” of my own? Was there a purpose to all the bad fortune raining down? If I stretched my imagination, I might be able to call it that.

My mysterious birth could be the unexpected lactation. Without a new baby, my breast shouldn’t have have been producing milk. Then I got the call about the biopsy. That set me on a quest to recover my health. The danger I faced was death by breast cancer. My companions were Larry and the kids. The descent into darkness would be Tuesday’s surgery, which would make the mastectomy the wound.

Or was Eddy the wound? My beautiful progeny, whose own descent into darkness was leading him into insanity… Maybe my quest was to rescue my son?

Where was my wise advisor to answer these questions? Larry wasn’t taking charge of our double disasters; his parents weren’t talking and mine were dead. And what about my transformation? What would I become after the surgery? A wounded half-woman with a maniac son?

It was hard to believe this “journey” was going to improve me. But even if it did — if I somehow miraculously managed to transcend my illness, to accept my disfigurement, to trust in my fate and my son’s — what could I possibly bring back to my community? What would be my gift?

ORIENTATION

After that fitful night of no sleeping, the rest of the weekend passed calmly. Eddy spent most of the time in his room. Larry and I didn’t much talk. Then on Monday, we went to the hospital for surgery orientation.

First we sat on upholstered chairs and filled out questionnaires. I wielded the clipboard and pen. Larry sat close beside me. My anxiety rose as I watched other patients arrive and get clipboards. A sliver-haired woman teetered on her walker. An older man slapped his hat on his thigh. A white woman in a wheelchair was pushed by a Filipino. That was always the way, wasn’t it? The white people in the wheelchairs, the brown people pushing them? Would Eddy ever push me around in a wheelchair? Would Michael? Would Rose? Would I even live long enough to get old?

The form asked the same questions I’d already answered a dozen times: my name and address, social security number, insurance provider, employer. I suffocated an impulse to throw it on the floor, snapping it wordlessly in the air instead.

“Do you want me to do that?” Larry asked.

“Yes.”

I handed him the clipboard and he started checking boxes. “Are you experiencing pain in any part of your body?” he asked me, leaning closer to make a suggestion. “Let’s write ‘yes — in the ass.’”

Larry took my hand when I put it on his thigh, sat passively waiting when I withdrew. I was the leader of this expedition, but had no desire to get started.

After Larry finished the forms we waited, and waited, until a short woman in purple scrubs called us into a private room. She told us to arrive at six in the morning. I was Dr. Tarsa’s first surgery of the day. That was good, the nurse said, because the doctor wouldn’t be tired.

She told me not to eat or drink anything after midnight the night before — not even water — because they didn’t want me throwing up while lying on my back during surgery.

We should walk through the front of the hospital to get to the surgery department. Family members could wait in a small room nearby. Would there be any family members?

“Yes. My sister Claire is coming. My sister Jane, too. My daughter Rose, my son Michael, my husband.” I glanced at Larry. We weren’t sure what was going to happen with Ed.

After dropping off the family in the waiting room, I would go in the back alone, the nurse continued. My husband could come with me at first, while I changed and they prepared me for the operation. They would give me a sedative, if I wanted one, and make a mark on the breast to be removed with a black felt pen. It was the left breast they were removing, wasn’t it?

“Yes.”

When they were ready to wheel me into the operating room, Larry would go to sit in the small waiting room with the others. The surgeon would come out when it was over and tell them all how it went.

“How it went?”

Whether they got all the cancer. If anything unexpected happened. What the sentinel node biopsy showed. How I was recovering.

“Anything unexpected?”

She nodded. I laughed — a short, explosive burst of air from my nostrils,like a horse. “You mean, like death?”

A thin smile.

The room was small, with a desk, a few chairs, windows that would look into the next cubicle if they weren’t covered with thick, rubberized curtains. Mauve. An old color. No one liked mauve in 2003.

“Sorry,” I told her. “I know you’re just doing your job.”

“You’re hoping there will be no cancer in the sentinel node,” she continued, “that it hasn’t gotten into your lymph system. That’s the news you want to get after the operation.”

“Yes.”

Next the nurse held up a stiff card with round smiley faces on it, but instead of smiling, they grimaced and frowned. Under each expression was a number. “This is a pain indicator for you to use to communicate with the nurses when requesting medication,” she said. Larry squeezed my hand.

The face with a “1” underneath it frowned a little. The face with a “2” grimaced and squinted his eyes. You could tell he was male because he didn’t have eyelashes. At level six he screamed and sweated. Or were those droplets springing off his face tears?

“Do you understand the chart?”

I nodded.

“Don’t ever say you’re on level six,” Larry said, “ or they’ll think you’re lying and won’t give you the good stuff. Just say five.”

The nurse produced more papers. “You’re scheduled to have a radical mastectomy of the left breast and possible lymphadenectomy, is that correct?”

“Yes… I guess?”

“Be sure to bring your referral form with you.”

I had to smile. Were they afraid someone would slip by them without prior authorization, some desperate woman hoping to get her breast removed for free?

We signed a form indicating our consent for the surgery, another one releasing the hospital from liability in case anything unexpected happened.

“Death happens,” I muttered to myself, rephrasing a popular bumper sticker I’d seen. I remembered a high school girlfriend who’d died unexpectedly during a routine diagnostic procedure. I remembered meeting Death in Mom’s hospital room 30 years before. I hoped He hadn’t been insulted when I ran out abruptly. Did He remember my name?

Next it was time for the tour. She walked us through a maze of halls, pointing out the signs that would guide our way to the surgery center the next morning, saying hello to her fellow workers as we passed. When we reached the back corner of the hospital, she pointed out the small waiting room for the family. Then we walked through swinging double doors into a bright, white light. This was the recovery room.

Patients in various states of consciousness and undress lay on gurneys in cubicles formed by hanging curtains. Two cheery nurses sat behind a counter at their station, manipulating files and entering data on computers. The tour nurse introduced us and showed us around, gesturing with her hand upheld at the comatose patients lying with one flaccid arm or hairy leg flung free of the covers, as if they were sites of interest.

“This is where you’ll be taken after surgery.”

“Will my husband be able to come in here with me?”

“No. He’ll meet you in your room. You wouldn’t know if he was here, anyway. You’ll be out.”

We passed through the recovery room and down a wide hall that led to several operating rooms. “You’ll be having your surgery in one of these rooms. Room A, I think. Or maybe Room B.”

One door swung open and I got a brief glimpse: a table under a big, white circular light. Big equipment on wheels. Old, yellowed linoleum. Three doctors walked by us in silly-looking outfits, blue scrubs with white shower caps on their heads and shoes. They were carefree, confident, laughing.

“Do you have any questions?”

Larry and I looked at each other blankly. My mind had emptied and filled with white fluorescent light.

That was the twenty-third chapter of my novel, Count All This. To continue, follow the free chapter links below or buy a digital copy of the whole book on Amazon, where leaving a rating or review will help others find my story.

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