I have been absent awhile, dear friends, fighting a battle alongside my brave sister, a battle we could not win. After nine weeks of caretaking at my house, she passed away at the very end of November, the victim of a particularly acute form of pancreatic cancer.
What most people don’t know is that in the seven months before her diagnosis, I was working with her to find answers to her intractable pain, as she sought help and treatment.
Pancreatic cancer is insidious. If it were a person, you might describe it as smart, sneaky, and implacably cruel. At times it hides from chemo designed to eradicate it. Other times it manages to weaponize the most toxic elements of the treatment to use against the patient. While no one can say why it seems to be on the rise, most experts can tell you its high mortality rate owes to the near complete absence of symptoms until it’s too late. Over half the cases, when discovered, have already metastasized. My sister’s was one of them.
However, she did have one obvious glaring symptom right from the beginning. She awoke last March to excruciating pain, which she described with great specificity to at least eight doctors over the next six months. Pain is subjective and difficult to quantify, I will grant you. It’s also dismissed all too often, particularly when it comes to older female patients.
When traditional scans failed to turn up anything (and my sister asked about pancreatic cancer twice), she and I were essentially launched, unaided into a months-long search for an answer. She visited various specialists and tried a variety of solutions. By the time we assembled a new team of doctors, which took weeks, it was far too late. Maybe it always was.
My sister—my breath, my blood, my bone, my history, my sometimes sparring partner and always best friend—died more quickly than anyone could have imagined, notwithstanding my awkward but full-hearted attempts to act as caregiver, advocate, and nurse.
She was amazing. She, so courageous despite the pain. She breathed through it, argued with it, powered over it until that became impossible. She drove with me to Canada this summer because she wanted to. She had a small dog-sitting business and she honored her contracts until she couldn’t walk. She reached out to doctors and nurses and made friends and comforted friends until the drugs and the cancer began to steal her mind. I thought I knew her, but she astounded me.
I am in shock, needless to say. How fast she disappeared, my sister for life. I’ve tried not to be angry. That’s hard, but it will pass. I have previous experience with this. It feels awful and awfully familiar. Already the scab is forming that allows me to get through each day. Inside will take a longer. I wrote her obituary. Take a look if you feel like it.
I am so thankful for the outpouring of sympathy and the support of good friends and neighbors. I am gratified by the reaction of at least one doctor who wants to review her case to see if early detection was even possible. I would like to see future patients spared at least a modicum of the pain that so adversely affected my sister’s life for nine months.
I will find my way back to my fiction, friends. I owe that to her and to you. Watch this space; I hope in a month to begin sharing with you excerpts from my new Sam Tate book.
Thank you.