Adelina

This week. Wow. This week. I’m so tired. So mentally and emotionally beat up. And I’m not even the cancer patient. Jesus, what M must be going through, himself, that he hasn’t told me.

Let’s go back and start with Tuesday, July 10.

I stayed home that day. I tried to work from the kitchen table, but I really couldn’t. The appointment with Dr. Hudnall at 1:40 p.m. was just this elephant in the room, impossible to ignore, indeed, impossible to do anything but concentrate on.

Somewhere in between staring at the giant elephant in the room and getting ready to go to the doctor’s appointment, one of our little dogs, Bella, got into it with one of our big dogs, Hermes, and, predictably, Hermes won. There was a little bit of blood and it was momentarily scary, but, oddly (and only in retrospect, because neither dog was seriously injured), it was a necessary distraction.

It was a quiet drive to the doctor’s office, for the most part. We held hands. I made weak attempts at jokes. We listened to the radio, and I tried to forget every song that played. I don’t want to hear any of those songs later and be brought back to that moment of driving to the doctor to hear confirmation of a horrible fact we already knew.

We got to the doctor’s office, checked in, and once in the exam room, were seen immediately by a nurse who looks like she runs a lot of 5k’s. We gave her the CD’s of M’s bone, ultrasound and CT scans, as well as all our printed off copies of test reports. We told her M’s story going back to the day this all really got started, June 3. She seemed to appreciate our thoroughness, took M’s vitals, and then left.

Dr. Hudnall entered a short time later. Dr. H is a man probably somewhere in his 50’s. Tall, slender, dark grayish/white hair, glasses, a questioning sort of expression on his face, like he’s mentally always challenging something and years of doing so have left corresponding lines and wrinkles on his face. He’s also direct and to the point. He probably could have written this whole blog post in five words.

We told M’s story to Dr. H. Dr. H did the world’s fastest prostate exam, felt M’s nuts, and then pronounced to us that M has prostate cancer. “You’re smart people, you’ve undoubtedly already figured this out,” Dr. H said. Of course, the caveat is that this is all speculation until the prostate is biopsied, which Dr. H ordered for Thursday morning, July 12. He wanted to look at the bladder, too, just in case.

M is too young to have prostate cancer. And that it appears already to have spread means we’re dealing with something very aggressive. Dr. H said that he wants to take a “kitchen sink” approach to dealing with the cancer. The first thing we need to do is to stop feeding the cancer cells, and prostate cancer cells eat testosterone. So, starting Monday, July 16, no more testosterone. M will begin hormone therapy, and within 24 hours, he’ll be testosterone free (apparently whatever drug he’s going to be put on will generate a full on, male hormone dump incredibly quickly). The other drug Dr. H discussed with us is one I won’t get right if I try to guess the name, but it’s another hormone therapy drug specifically targeting prostate cancer. The drug, once testosterone production is shut off, inhibits the generation of cancer cells. It’s supposed to be effective without having as much in the way of negative side effects as chemo does. From there, we’ll figure out what other treatment is warranted.

I have to pause here and note that, as I’m writing this, the clock is about to carry us across the 12 a.m. threshold, into Saturday, July 14. So much emotion, so many conversations, so much other stuff has happened in the four or five days since Tuesday’s visit with Dr. H, that I’m having a hard time, even just these few short days later, putting myself back in the mindset and emotional state I found myself in in the moments during which that initial visit with Dr. H was taking place, and in the moments immediately afterwards.

So I’ll leave it with this: the biopsy got scheduled for Thursday morning, the absolute earliest they could get M in. Also, M has cancer. M took all this in stride, processed the news without a flinch, and then almost seemed to shrug as though to say, “Okay, let’s get on with it”. I watched him, thinking to myself, “How are you not a puddle, M? How???”  This man is a rock, I swear to you.

That is, until he isn’t.

M was on the phone as we drove away from Dr. H’s office, talking with the surgery center people where his biopsy was to be conducted. I was driving, and about to get on 410 East to head home. But M, still on the phone, gestured for me to get on IH-10 East, instead, which is definitely not the way home. A few seconds later he got off the call with the surgery center and told me, “I want to visit my grandma.”

M’s grandma passed away a little over ten years ago. She pretty much raised M, with help from his grandma’s oldest daughter, Jane, who is also M’s aunt and his mother’s oldest sister. M’s grandma was incredibly well-loved by the whole surviving family, especially, it seems, by her grandkids. She also sounds like she loved to drink, cuss, and have a good time, and like she was an unabashed character. I’m not gonna lie, for as much as I wish I could have had the chance to meet her, I’m just as glad I didn’t. I think she would have intimidated me tremendously at the very least, possibly cut me, worst case.

Anyway, M had talked about going to visit his grandma, taking me to her gravesite to meet her, but we had never done so. But on Tuesday, after the doctor’s appointment, we drove to San Fernando Cemetery on the west side to go see Adelina Ricondo. First, though, we had to stop at one of the many, many flower shops lining the streets that ring the cemetery. You can buy styrofoam crosses with words like “Abuela” or “Tio”, or fake flowers “planted” in old coffee cans wrapped in glued-on fabric. We bought coffee can filled with fake yellow flowers for five dollars. Next, we crossed the street to a no name, sketchy as fuck convenience store, where the man inside was merciful enough to let me use the restroom while M bought a twelve of Miller Lite (restroom break…try dealing with a urologist and urology issues and NOT feel like you have to pee all the time).

M directed me as I drove through the San Fernando entrance, back toward where his grandma is buried. I couldn’t help but notice along the way a car parked on the side of the cemetery road with the passenger side door open, and a woman sitting at a gravesite a few feet away, with some helium filled balloons, one of which said “Dad”. You could feel her pain. It was heart-wrenching. But not as heart-wrenching as what happened next.

When we got to M’s grandma’s gravesite, I pulled a little off the road. M grabbed two Miller Lites from the 12 we’d bought at the C-store. He also handed me a beer, then grabbed the yellow flowers and crawled out of the car.

I followed him the few steps to his grandma’s grave. There is no big marble or granite headstone marking the familial burial plot. There is only a bronze marker, flush with the ground, with Adelina’s name and the dates of her birth and death engraved on it. June 9, 1925 – March 13, 2008. M bent over and placed the flowers and a single can of Miller Lite on the marker.

And then he grasped his knees and sobbed.

He stayed like that for a long time, shuddering quietly as he cried. I stroked his back, while tears rolled down my own cheeks.

I have only seen M cry twice before, but never like this. I am jaded, pissed off at the world, cynical, and halfways dead inside most of the time. But it gutted me to watch M’s face contorted in pain and soaked in tears, wanting nothing more than to talk to the person who meant the world to him since birth, but he couldn’t, because she’s been gone for 10 years now.

M lowered himself slowly to his hands and knees, still crying freely, and began pulling away the weeds and grass that threatened to infringe on his grandma’s headstone. I tried to help, but I felt so small and useless.

When he was done, M and I sat on the ground and drank our beers with Adelina. It was sweaty and sunny and there were tiny ants biting us. I am truly horrible at being supportive and encouraging when faced with situations like these. It’s not that I don’t feel anything, because I do. But I tend to draw into myself when faced with such overwhelmingly shitty situations. I told M, “I don’t know what to do or say right now.”

M still had a few stray tears trickling down from under his sunglasses. He looked very thoughtful for a moment, and then he said, “I think what my grandma would do, is she’d let me cry, and then she would say, ‘Are you done crying now? Good. Because now you have to fight. I raised you to be a fighter.’ And then she’d probably make fun of how I cry.” He laughed. I laughed. We sipped our beer.

I asked him, “What’s your favorite story about your grandma?”

“Oh, there are so many,” he said. M has a smooth and gentle voice, it’s very soothing. He chuckled. “One of my favorites…I was 19 or 20 and living with her, and back then, for some reason, I always carried a gun with me, a little .44. My grandma didn’t like it. She always told me, ‘If you can’t do it with your own hands, then don’t do it.’ Anyway, she lived in this rental house, and she was moving out and needed her deposit money back to move into the next place. She cleaned the house, did everything she needed to do to get the deposit money back. But the landlord, of course, he was an asshole and he was like, ‘No, not giving you your deposit back,’ which just pissed her off.

“So I went to him separately, talked with him, got him to agree to give my grandma her deposit back. But before I could tell her he was going to give her the money, she got all dressed, and my uncle had this little air gun pistol–looked just like a .45–and she loaded that thing and had it all cocked and stuck it in her handbag. She was going to go down there with that gun and demand her money back.”

We laughed some more. We sat there a bit longer with the sun beating on us, sweat running down the sides of our faces and down our backs inside our shirts.

“Let’s go,” M said after a while. The drive home felt a bit freer and lighter, in spite of the tears that popped out of our eyes now and then. Thinking about it now, I really think Adelina was there, sitting with M and talking to him, laughing with us at the rent deposit story.

Dr. Scalzi called to check on M while we were driving. But of course she called, because she’s one of our angels. So is M’s grandma.

I’m counting on angels.