Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine

Robin calls while I am in my second meeting of the day. Tells me Dr. Madre is leaving the country today but has my chart with him and will call me while he travels. Expect a call before lunch.

HIPAA, Schmipaa, I guess. So much for keeping my health information under lock and key. Our friends in the Transportation Safety Administration and perhaps everyone at the X-Ray machine will be privy to my ovarian woes by lunch time.

But this is no time to be bashful about my tender little girly parts. I am on a mission.

I get the feeling she thinks I think she made more of the situation than necessary. Or maybe Dr. Madre thinks that. A mountain out of a mole hill. A tempest in a tea cup. Ran around screaming that the sky is falling.

No. I think the opposite. I think what passes as a routine occurrence in Robin's world really is a Big Fat Deal in mine and that I have a right to be upset. It is my uterus, cervix and ovaries on the bullseye. Am I not a dream patient? Taking ownership and responsibility for my health? Isn't an informed consumer better than one that you can't be sure is informed enough to provide informed consent for anything?

Hours go by and no word from Dr. Madre. I have convinced myself that he forgot all about me and boarded his plane and now it has taken off and he's realized that he stowed my chart in his checked suitcase and he can't get it until he lands on the other side of the planet. Or he gets no phone service over the Atlantic. Or he just forgot altogether.

I call Robin later in the afternoon. She assures me that Dr. Madre is still in the country, and apologizes for the delay. He is not departing until tonight but is in clinicals all day in an outlying office. She gives me the low down on how to reach him and who to ask for that will get him on the phone. Robin knows the ropes.

I am relieved to the point of crying when I get him on the phone. He tells me he thinks that Robin may not have done a great job explaining. I told him she explained just fine what she was comfortable explaining with without him being there, in my opinion, but I am one of THOSE patients. I need details. Information. Titles. I want to know the names of things and the rationale for what he wants to do. Robin could in no way answer my questions. Not her fault. But now that I have you...

"Liza, I know this about you," he says. "There are some cells I think may be the cause of your abnormal lab results. I want to make sure we stay on top of things. You can come see me every three months so I can look to see where they are going or you can have the blahblahblah procedure and be done with it in one shot."

"OK but you scared me when you said that you wanted me back every 3 months. What happened to 6?"

"Liza, you are a very compliant patient. Any other patient I would tell to get the blahblahblah procedure because I may never see them again. But you take care of yourself and I know you'll be back, so if you want to do something less invasive until we know more, I know you are not going to vanish and never return and maybe put yourself at risk."

I ask about the procedure. It sounds heinous but he says he'll lidocaine me to the hilt before hand. He says then I never have to think about it again.

I ask about the one part of the last test that he'd been concerned about. He tells me if that is not resolved, then he'll take care of that with the blahblahblah procedure too. Everything else is fine. Great results. No other worries.

I tell him I want the blahblahblah thing. I want it taken care of now and forever. I remind him that he knows what I worry about.

"Yes I know what you worry about. Liza, you do not have Cancer. You are not going to develop Cancer while I am in Africa. I know your concerns. Your children have nothing to worry about. Their mother is not going anywhere."

I absolutely love this man for having been listening all along last time.

I tell him I will call Robin and schedule myself for the week he returns. I wish him much success on his mission. I hang up. I close my door. And then I really cry. But only out of sheer relief.

It's My Uterus and I'll Cry If I Want To

I finish the day in a bit of a fog. Abnormal cells. Is that code for Cancer? If I have Cancer someone is going to have to say that word. And not whisper it like they did in St. Elmo's Fire. I am reminded of my mother's hysterectomy because of "pre-cancer." Pre-cancer. What a crock. All that is is cancer that has not spread. That doesn't mean you don't have Cancer! It just sounds like you don't! No one forfeits at uterus for something minor!

On my way home I go to call Scott and realize that my colleague has left me a message checking in on my health and sanity. Both of which are in a little trouble evidently. I call her back. She commutes with another colleague that I absolutely adore. I catch them both up on the outcome of my conversation with Robin. They are both equally troubled and encourage me to take matters into my own hands.

I talk to Scott about it briefly as I cross the bridge. But just hearing his voice makes me want to cry. And if I cry I won't have to worry about Cancer because I will drive off the bridge to my certain death. One more way to skin that cat.

I call Charlotte and boo hoo a bit before collecting her advice.

At no time am I even remotely compelled to call my mother. Not for a moment.

But those I do tell agree that:

Dr. Madre's medical mission is not my problem and not reason enough to wait to hear about my choices.

While I appreciate Dr. Madre's devotion and concern, I am sure there is another doctor competent to read my chart and test results and explain my choices.

I need to know more now, because I am really no good at all at waiting around.

If someone has Cancer, I need to hear the words "We found Cancer." and nothing less definitive than that.

I try to sleep that night, my worst fears potentially coming to life. I do not have the luxury of worrying only about me. I have children. And need to stay alive so they aren't stuck being raised by their lunatic father.

At 6 am I get out of bed, make coffee and dial Robin's number by heart.

"Robin, it's Liza, Dr. Madre's patient. Before you call me back, I'd like to ask you a favor. If Dr. Madre has not left the country, I'd like to speak with him directly about his findings and my options before he leaves. If he has left, I'd like to speak to whatever doctor is following Dr. Madre's cases while he is away and begin my treatment immediately. If something is wrong, I want to begin treatment at once, not when Dr. Madre's medical mission has concluded. I don't think that is unreasonable. I hope you agree."

I hang up, sip my coffee and cry. Just a little.

Survey says!

I take deep breath as I answer. Simply so I do not have to breath at all while Robin speaks.

She is very nonchalant. It is confusing to me. What she seems to be saying is nothing I find easy to take in stride.

Dr. Madre is leaving on a medical mission and he's asked her to make an appointment for when he gets back.

"An appointment for what?" I ask.

"He wants to know how you'd prefer to be followed."

"And what am I being followed for?" Where exactly are we headed, me and my uterus?

Robin seems hesitant. "Well, there were some abnormal cells."

This isn't news. These wacky little cells were what landed me in the stirrups for the last horror show. "More cells? Different cells? Stranger looking cells?" I am trying not to sound shrill and panicked.

"Something he'd like to watch," she explains, sort of tentatively. I am sure these cells are just fascinating, but...

This all sounds familiar. She's back on the prior page of the chart for sure. I listen for sounds of her gasping in recognition, laughing and saying, "Wait a minute. I am so sorry. There's more. Let's make an appointment six months from now!"

But she says nothing. I try to clarify. "So Dr. Madre wants to talk about my options. What might be on the list?"

"Well, you can have a blahblahblah procedure, or you can come in for tests every three months"

Three months? When I was there two weeks ago he said I'd need to come back every six months. So something HAS changed. "Can I come in tomorrow?" I ask. I am really nervous now.

"Dr. Madre is leaving for Africa for three weeks. Let's put you in for when he gets back." Silence while she checks the schedule. "Dr. Madre is booked for the first week he's back. I can't open the next week's schedule this far in advance. I should be able to see it tomorrow. Why don't I call you back tomorrow morning and get you set up?"

I tell her to call my cell. I have meetings offsite at 8, 9, and 10 am. I will pick up no matter. A lot can happen in the 4 weeks I am already forced to wait. I will be a lunatic by then. And I leave for Key West Saturday. I need a plan well before I taxi down the runway.

She seems relieved to be ending the phone call.

I am anything but relieved.

Waiting to Exhale

And with all the distracting hoop-lah, two weeks had passed. My test results from the The Little Shop of Horrors should be in. They had said two weeks. To prevent myself from hyperventilating I told myself that "two weeks" was probably like the "40 weeks" one's pregnancy is anticipated to last . No one knows for sure. It is a guesstimate at best. Days and weeks on either side were an accepted window.

Except if you are the one waiting.

I busy myself at work. I have plenty to focus upon. Projects, problems, process improvements. And the moment I leave my desk, it happens. I get a call from Robin, the medical assistant that held my hand through the plowing, irrigation and harvesting two weeks earlier. She leaves a message asking simply that I call back. Here we go again.

I call back immediately and leave a message.

And then for the next 2 hours I refuse to leave my desk for fear that the moment I go get hot water for my chamomile tea to calm my jangling nerve endings, Robin will call back. That is routinely the way my cookie crumbles.

One of my team calls from her office. "Do you have a minute to go over something?"

My normal response would be to say, "Sure. Stay put, I'll be over. Want some coffee while I'm on my way?"

But instead, I say, faster than usual so as to not stay on the line, "Yes, but I'm wigging out, and I'd come tell you why but I can't leave my office." She and I have worked together for years. Have born witness to each other's divorces, marriages, new baby's, break ups, family feuds. She knows exactly when I am sending up a flare. This is clearly one of those times.

She appears in my office within seconds and closes the door. "What gives?" Her eyes are darting around the room for signs of trouble. Suspicious packages. Subpoenas. Unsolicited anonymous gifts. J. sitting in the corner handcuffed to the chair in a last ditch act of obsession.

I tell her about Robin's message. She asks if I've called back. I reply that I have...3 times in the last hour. But I've only left one message so as to not appear to be a nut. Even though I am beginning to secretly suspect that I am.

She makes a few suggestions about getting through. Even one that includes just appearing in the office two floor below us and insisting that I get an audience with the doctor or I won't leave. I promise to keep her posted.

For the next two hours I obsessively call back. Leave messages. Dial every direct line in the practice. Leave increasingly more desperate sounding messages. As I rise to leave my office and take the stairs two at a time to the office 30 feet below me, My phone rings.

Robin. The moment of truth.

War! What is it Good For?

And so, I am coming to terms with a life without Mom.

It has been a very long time coming and I am finding peace in the idea that it is finally all on the table, whether consumed or not.

I feel badly that Charlotte - and to some extent Joe - occupy the dangerous DMZ of this battle. I don't know what to expect exactly, but I know how Charlotte feels and will understand what she feels she has to do to try to support me in my position without compromising her relationship with Mom, however tenuous. She will likely maintain her own tentative relationship with Mom, but carefully rebuff any criticism of me, and insist on a detour around such discussions. Bring on the weather.

Joe is a different story. I have no desire to place anyone in the middle of a battle that isn't theirs to fight, and will not engage in any further banter with Joe if I can't be sure I trust him. And I don't routinely trust him. My experience has been, that if Joe feels like you have crossed the boundary into Trusting Him And Expecting Adult Mature Behavior, he panics and has to take immediate action to make you retreat from those thoughts and cast him off once again as an idiot in grown up sized clothes. The minute he feels you have placed some life-sized burden in his lap and asked him to share it, he places his dunce cap squarely on his head and resumes his role as Village Idiot. If I were to share any of my thoughts or feelings with him about this situation, he would step back, consider which side of his bread is more thickly buttered and by whom, and take the side that will benefit him personally most handsomely. And frankly, I know the result of that evaluation even from a distance. He needs my mother's guidance, support and money more than he needs anything he gets from me, and therefore, even if she were suggesting that we bring back slavery and repeal the right for women to vote, he'd take her side. He has more to gain in supporting her than in attempting to disagree with any success.

And I can truly live with all of this.

The truth of the matter is, my mother has been training us for years. Pushing us, insisting really, that we get accustomed to a life without her. She left our home when we needed her most. She dumped considerable baggage on my Dad, who really needed a partner to tackle the issues. She would opine from a distance, and pressure us to conform to her thinking by threatening more permanent abandonment if we didn't comply. She would give advice from a distance and insist that we take it, again with threats and insults about our own capabilities, only so she could stay safely in her own world, far removed from our own, and convince herself that she had Done Her Job as a parent. Met her obligations. Checked all the boxes.

When really, what screamed the loudest above the din my mother always created, was that she had checked out, did not appreciate being sucked back in, and would provide what minimal support she had to to convince herself and others that she had acted as a mother should.

It was vacant. She was absent. The pretending was infuriating.

And now after all of these years of minimal commitment, vague involvement, superficial parenting and thinly masked disinterest, she is getting what she's been pushing for all along.

My mother has been coaching us to accept a life with no need for or dependence upon her. Like my brother, she panics under the pressure. Does not want the responsibility. This finality has really been what she's sought in a distant relationship with her children all along. She does not want the pressure of traditional parental roles.

And so now that I have decided that a life that doesn't include her and her disappointments is just fine with me, she is a little unnerved.

Not by the result, mind you. But that her bluff has been called. She's pissed that she's been busted for faking it all along.

Games People Play

Of course, I am not going to respond. There is absolutely nothing to gain from it. My brother is a blooming idiot and will never appreciate the complexities of the situation. The relationship. The psychology. Forest Gump had better intuition. And considerably more charm, I might add.

But to be truthful, the five-year-old in me would really like to. In some way.

Maybe to just play her game and reply, "What ever do you mean? Nothing is going on. What are you talking about?"

Wouldn't that get the tongues wagging up and down the coast? Mom's Big Calamity not even registering on my Top 10 List of Things for Which I Wish I Could Get a Do-Over. He'd have to obediently report back that I had absolutely nothing unusual or of import to mention. And Mom, incensed, would screech, shooting the messenger as she always does, "Text her back, whatever that is, that she knows damn well blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-dee-blah-yakkety-yakkety-yakkety..." all in a voice that could peel paint.

Or maybe it would be more sporting to send back a third-party insult. Something blistering that would effectively impale its recipient the moment Joe figured out how to use the "forward" function on his pre-paid flip phone. Perhaps something that began with the words, "Our mother is an unstable lunatic that is becoming increasingly more dangerous to herself and others and really needs to be institutionalized at once. Please retrieve all of the registered and unregistered weapons from her home. I have filed for a restraining order and she and her equally unstable husband should check with the local authorities before entering the county in which I reside. Which is the county where you reside. You can thank me later."

Or, pretending to confide in him, I could lay it all out. The gossiping to Charlotte about me. About him. The insane complaint about my not kissing Bill on the mouth. Bill's implied intention to leave Mom penniless and alone and his statements about ensuring that Joe will never see a penny of THEIR money because it's all HIS money. And then once Joe's loyalty is on the fence, I can tear into Mom's lifetime of drama and bullshit and the fact that she has only herself to blame if she feels her children's loyalty waning. She can couch it anyway she pleases, but the truth is, she has been walking away from us and expecting us the obediently follow at a distance for decades. Dumped us and all our ensuing baggage solely in Dad's lap so she could go have fun. Has been trading our interests for those of the men she's ensnared all along. We haven't ranked in the top three for years and she's just pissed that we've gotten wise to her. That's what's going on, my gullible friend.

Those are the things I'd love to relate by my unwitting carrier pigeon brother.

But I won't. Because he's guaranteed to inadvertently botch the mission. And really, it just has no value. I don't care enough to engage in this game.

Phone-y Baloney

All that said, there is a part of me that wants to call Mom on all the trash talk and misinformation she is buzzing about in her corner of the universe. I want to also set her straight. And call her on her less than flattering conduct over the years. Maybe send another letter. (as if it would meet with a different fate than the one she'd sent to me...)

But I won't do any of that because truthfully, there is some relief for me in the notion of decisiveness and finality. I feel as though I've spent half of my waking life dealing with Mom.Or her nonsense. Or her social drama. Or something else she's cooked up and served on a platter for those around her to be force fed like future fois gras geese.

There is so much that I'd love to enlighten Mom about. Share my opinion. Correct the impression. Things that I'd like to remind her about that she remembers a little less clearly.

But it is a waste of time. And energy. And a drag on my soul.

And it no longer is important enough to warrant these sacrifices. I genuinely don't care.

Mom and Charlotte touch base a few days later. Charlotte reports that there was no mud slinging about my response to The Insipid Letter.

There are a few possible reasons:

1 - She knows Charlotte will repeat every last nasty word and wants to come off as The Fairest of Them All.

2 - She wants Charlotte to be able to tell me "Mom doesn't give one good S*** about what you did. She didn't even mention it. Talked about the weather."

3 - She really doesn't care. I am dead to her.

It could be all three. But she must be flapping to someone.

Joe.

A few days later I am at my desk enjoying the relative peace of having finally dealt with Mom when I get a text from Joe.

"What's going on with you and Mom?!"