Two Years

One February afternoon of my junior year in high school, I came home to an empty house from my fabulous life as a new upperclassman. I was the Captain and MVP of the swim team. I had a new boyfriend and great friends. I had a fantastic job and a solo in the winter choir concert. I followed my just home from school routine and began to go through the mail lying on the dining room table. Off to the side, there was an already opened letter from a doctor’s office. The letter mentioned a finding in a bone scan my dad had the week before. The words “multiple myeloma” meant absolutely nothing to me so I quickly Google’d them.

All I remember from that day was a frantic phone call to my mom, a lot of crying and a lot of attempted reassurance. My dad had been diagnosed with Stage 2 multiple myeloma - cancer of the bone marrow.

I didn’t have much of a relationship with my dad. I was a daddy’s girl, but it was because my mom was always around. She disciplined me and made me work for what I wanted. When dad was home, all I had to do was ask and he’d give me anything. He let me stay out late when mom was out of town and he’d order pizza if she wasn’t going to be home to make dinner. He loved sports and insisted that I have an entire wardrobe of Cleveland Indians apparel. He coached my tennis team in high school and we went to baseball games together sometimes. He also had a job that forced him to work over 60 hours a week. He was in a Monday night bowling league and he’d get in late at night smelling like cigars and beer. He always watched the big games at his friends’ places and he usually passed out on the couch after dinner. I don’t remember a time when I saw him in the audience at my choir concerts or poolside during a swim meet. I can’t even remember a time when he drove me to a practice or a rehearsal.

I had seen many things happen to my dad. He had his first heart attack when I was five leading up to an eventual quadruple bypass surgery when I was thirteen. No matter what happened, we always knew the things he did to correct his health would make him better. This was different.
Although he had options of chemotherapy, radiation therapy and transplants, this was still a death sentence. They gave him two years to live.

Over the next few months, his bones became so weak that he had to quit his job. He lost his hair and several pounds – he weighed less than I did. He threw up a lot and we had to wear masks around him. My friends weren’t allowed to come over because he was petrified of contacting any kind of sickness. He was so weak that a common cold could have killed him. The only thing he could do was lie on the couch and watch TV. Sitting hurt too much because he didn’t have anything to cushion his weak tailbone since he had lost so much weight. It was the worst few months of my life. I had never seen anything like this before and I couldn’t understand why fate had chosen my father.

November rolled around and the doctor announced that dad’s myeloma cell counts had gone down enough for them to stop chemo and start moving forward with the stem cell transplant procedure. It was to take place in December but, because it is still such a new procedure, they weren’t sure how long the effects would last. He didn’t care – he wanted to go through with it.
Dad left for the hospital on my eighteenth birthday. They put him on some heavy narcotics as a machine slowly sucked out his cells. He was completely under for a week. Visiting him was a joke. He was permanently hallucinating. My personal favorite was his warning about “the Palestinian doctor that was peaking through the window” at him. He would have conversations with the dial tone thinking it was someone calling. It was so hard not to laugh, but it hurt so badly to see him like that.

The transplant process isn’t too exciting – a lot of painful waiting. They extract the cells in his bone marrow, freeze them in hopes of killing the myeloma cells and finally inject the “healthy” cells back into his bones. He was recovering over Christmas and got back home on New Years Day.

The next few weeks were tough. He was sick a lot and irritable. Finally, just around his birthday on February 1st, he started to feel better. When spring hit, he started golfing again and even came out to help coach the boys’ tennis team. He couldn’t move much, but he tried his best.
Although this was one of the worst things that ever happened to my dad and our family, it was also one of the best. My dad was selfish and didn’t care about anyone but himself during my childhood. My mom resented him for never being around but hated herself even more for dealing with it. They fought all the time about the serious and the stupid stuff. They were ready to call it quits.

My family is closer than ever now. We have so many wonderful family friends and have learned to genuinely appreciate one another. We hang out together, talk about intellectual and worldly issues and my dad even talks about one day walking me down the aisle. He told me once that he is more afraid to give me away than anything. I get excited to go home on the weekends and I call him during big games to talk about the plays and get his expert reaction. We’ve learned to appreciate time, which is something that so many take for granted. I never realized how realistic the end is until it was put in complete perspective.

It could be much worse, but just a few months ago, dad’s cancer resurfaced. He has chemo treatments twice a week and he still gets sick from time to time. He denied the offer to have another stem cell transplant. I don’t blame him.

It’ll be four years this February. So much for two years.