I watched quarterback Colt McCoy go down in the opening minutes of the BCS Bowl Game last week. As he was helped off the field I said to Wally and the Snapper, “If I were his mom, I’d be down there with a couple of Advil telling him to suck it up and get back in the game.”
Wally said, “That’s why they don’t let moms in the locker room.”
Sure enough the camera showed Mr. McCoy headed to his son’s side.
The Snapper said, “Actually, they don’t let moms like you into the locker room.”
Actually it’s my sons who wouldn’t want me in the locker because they know in fact that I would slip them some aspirin and send them back in the game with the tender, motherly advice to “play through the pain.”
I come by this attitude genetically—handed down from both sides of the family. My mother’s mother famously said “we don’t get TB in our family,” to a doctor who diagnosed my mother with TB in 1930. The expression has since evolved to “we don’t get sick in our family.”
The gene was also passed down from my paternal grandmother who arrived here from Ireland at the age of seventeen and became a nurse. She would always say to us, “As long as you have your health,” the subtext of which was, “unless you have a 104 degree fever, you are healthy and you should thank God you are so fortunate. For my grandmother, you had to be really sick not to have your health and—since she was a healthcare professional—we believed her.
This attitude has allowed me to deal with many of life’s minor healthcare crisis, such as broken arms, split lips and Wally’s heart “situation.” He came to me six years ago with the complaint that his heart was beating too rapidly. I told him to lay off the allergy medicine as it was probably causing his heart to race—and sent him back into the game. Four days later we were at the pediatric cardiologist and he was diagnosed with something called Wolf-Parkinson-White. He underwent surgery and now, lo and behold, he does indeed have his health again.
So the other day when George came to me and told me he had cancer, I immediately went into the same mode. I was positive it had not spread, that he had caught it early, that an operation would cure everything and he’d be back to being fine in no time. He said, “Let’s not talk about this now,” so we didn’t. I pushed cancer to the back of my mind, where I was determined to bury it. I rationalized that we wouldn’t know the full extent of the cancer until he underwent an MRI next week, so why borrow trouble? (This is another of my paternal grandmother’s expressions that has served me well).
I spent 48 hours blocking cancer like a 300 pound linebacker. I was good. Nothing got through that line. No doubts, no emotion, no tears—not even when I told Wally and the Snapper the news. I held them all off and refused to cede any yards. But this morning I learned that the cancer surgery involves removing part of George’s tongue. That threw me—and not just because I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure from his tongue over the years—because it made me realize that this is not a one and done situation. It will involve ongoing chemo and radiation and reconstructive surgery. If he—and we—are lucky, the doctors will catch it all and George will eventually be able to eat and talk again.
It’s the eventually that’s killing me. The idea of not hearing George talk is painful. He is a born storyteller with a great sense of timing and our conversations have given me deep pleasure over the years—as well as a lot of laughs.
The thought of him not being able to eat is equally unnerving. He takes pleasure in all aspects of food, even food shopping. We have long dinner hours in our house and I think the reason I know so much about Wally and the Snapper’s lives, even though they’re teens, is that George’s food keeps them at the table. He is a fabulous cook.
