My Mother, My Hero
That Time My Mom Saved My Life
Heroes are pretty popular these days. They have their own universes, films, and TV shows. They have lovable flaws and special powers. They stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. This piece isn’t about them, though. This piece is about the woman who gave birth to me.
This piece is about the woman who called my 1st-grade math teacher when I came home crying after school because I’d been reprimanded in front of the class for taking artistic liberties by illustrating around the equations on my homework. This piece is about the woman who e-mailed my child custody lawyer without my knowledge in an effort to somehow try to help by vouching for how wonderful I am. This piece is about the woman who stood up to an oncologist who didn’t know why I was fading away in a hospital bed and told him what she thought was wrong with my broken-down body and how to fix me. This piece is about the woman who saved my life. My mother, my hero.
My mother may not want to read this piece. My husband certainly won’t. I would never subject my children to it. No one close to me wants to think of me in the situation I was in when my mother saved my life. No one wants to think of my bald head and emaciated form. No one wants to think of what would have happened if my mom hadn’t spoken up. The reality of cancer and its costs is foreign to us healthy people; a bad dream that belongs to another time, another place, another person. But at one time, I was a 24-year-old cancer patient with a mysterious adverse reaction to a chemotherapy drug I’d been receiving. It was at that time that my mother saved my life.
My mom didn’t fly through the hospital room window wearing an iron suit or an enchanted cape. She sat, ate, and slept by my side for days in the hospital room while I endured tests and blood transfusions. When my oncologist told my mother that my breathing difficulties were not responding to any of the treatments and suggested she call my dad and sister back from their European travels “just in case,” she didn’t transform into an angry, radioactively charged up green beast. She became what she has always been; my advocate, my hero. Her magic tool was not a golden hammer, it was the internet.
When the man with the medical degree threw up his hands, the woman who’d had me ripped from her womb during an emergency C-section got to work. My mother stayed up through the night, scouring online articles for answers. I picture her, a golden light surrounding the crown of her head, a motherly halo of instinct and unconditional love penetrating the shadows of the unknown: the very essence of a hero’s task. (This is even more impressive considering handheld web browsers on smartphones were hardly a thing in 2009. Did she even have one? I don’t know.)
When morning came, my hero mother bravely presented a stack of papers to my oncologist. These papers detailed cases like mine. Stories of other patients whose chemotherapy treatment had included Bleomycin. Other patients who’d presented with symptoms of fever, shortness of breath, and a dry cough. Other patients who’d gotten worse, not better. Amazingly, my mom, with her motherly superhero vision, had seen what my oncologist could not. My mother correctly suspected that I had developed something known as Bleomycin Toxicity (also referred to as Bleomycin Induced Pneumintis or BIP).
The multiple bronchoscopies I’d undergone were inconclusive. The antibiotics I was receiving, useless. My hero mother had learned from her reading that to diagnose BIP, a PET scan would be needed. The answer my mother had found was to diagnose with a PET scan and treat with corticosteroids. It sounded almost too easy. Was it a guaranteed cure? No. BIP has a 24% mortality rate. Was it worth a shot? Hell yes. Graciously, my oncologist set aside his ego, listened to my hero mother, and ordered the PET scan.
Just as my mother had suspected, the scan of my lungs revealed inflammation. Clinically this is referred to as “bilateral interstitial infiltrates.” Being infiltrated is not good in superhero movies and it’s not good in lungs. Although there is no standardized treatment of BIP, corticosteroids had shown promising results for some of the patients my mom had read about. It was enough to go on. My oncologist started me on a steroid treatment immediately and from that very moment, I began to improve. I was released from the hospital a couple of days later and completed my cancer treatment, minus the Bleomycin.
Twelve years later, I am now married with two children of my own, a career, and a rather normal life in which I get to have mundane, healthy people problems like I can’t find any hair spray in the house or I can’t drink decaf coffee because it kind of hurts my stomach. I get to live this amazing, wonderful, life because my hero mother didn’t give up on me. I get to live because I had a woman looking out for me with, arguably, the fiercest of all kinds of love: motherly love. It’s the heroic kind of love that never gives up.
My mom may not dress in tight spandex clothing and wrestle villains from outer space, but she’s wrestled with darkness and brought back light for me. My mother wears scrubs that meticulously match her jewelry and shoes and answers phone calls at a school for deaf and blind children. My mom rides her bike to my house and brings my kids presents so often that the four-year-old automatically says, “What you brought for me, grandma?” when she hears her come through the kitchen door. My mom is a beloved grandma, wife, mom, and friend. My mother is many things but she will always be a hero to me.