Most summer jobs involve long, hot hours in a food stand, or longer, dull hours in a retail store stocking shelves with cans of tomatoes, or folding jeans and hanging t-shirts. Sometimes, if you're lucky, it involves late, hectic hours serving ungrateful people and their obnoxious children and earning just a little more in tips than your unfortunate retail-bound friends. Even more seldom, once in a great while, you land an internship in a field of your choosing, and get a taste of what your life could be like in a "real" job. This was NOT my summer.
Less than 24 hours after returning from school in my boyfriends tiny blue Saturn (which was packed to the HILT, poor thing) at an ungodly hour and sleeping on the worst futon in recorded history, I found myself alone with a woman who I didn't really know. She was naked, and I was soaked.
Now, this might sound like the juicy pages of some strange brand of novel erotica, but let me assure you, it was the FARTHEST thing from sexy in any context.
The woman, who will only be known as K, has stage 4 breast cancer, which has spread into her spine and down her back into her hips and legs, and now up into her brain. The cancer will kill her, and by the current estimates based on her condition, it will kill her soon.
My job this summer has been to help take care of her while her family gets rest and some time away. For anyone who has taken care of another adult in any capacity, much less someone very ill, you will understand that it is incredibly tiring work, and that breaks are needed frequently, but usually comes more seldom than that.
The impression that I got was that this would just be for a weekend or so, and maybe a few days here and there, but not for very long. I was happy to be able to provide relief for these poor, haggard looking people who so obviously needed a little R&R. Also, I figured out that I would be paid for these few days, and I was pretty stoked. Then I learned that I was getting paid double anything I'd ever been paid for a job, and I was even more excited. I thought- "A few days on a bed besides the futon, some major spending money, and I get to hang out with a lady who I remember being pretty nice. Awesome!"
As it usually does in my life, when it rains, it pours. Turns out, this has been MUCH more significant than a week's commitment. And the work, while on paper, does not appear terribly taxing ("medication management, dressing, toileting, bathing"), it has without a doubt been one of the most exhausting experiences I have ever had.
At the risk of stealing someone else's pun, and someone much funnier than me- We're going to Tarantino it. We're going to come back from that break to the part where K is naked and freezing and I'm all wet. It had already been an exhausting morning. After a night of waking up every 2 hours to administer pain medication, and sleeping only about 45 minutes in between each dose, K had been awakened with explosive diarrhea. And since the poor woman can barely help someone ELSE dress her, she is in no position to clean herself up during an event like this. We had spent the better part of the last 4 hours (starting at 5 am, mind you) battling said affliction, up and down in the bathroom, trying to keep K clean and dry, and trying to figure out exactly WHAT I was going to do with pajama pants and a floor mat with feces on them. Gag reflex stifled, and soiled laundry removed to the other bathroom tub to be rinsed at the earliest convenience- K's gut seemed to finally calm down. I knew that we had to get her into the tub to really get her cleaned up, since trying to use baby wipes was really only a band aid on an amputation. I was able to get her undressed and into the shower, and had a reasonable amount of success cleaning her up. But to understand how we got to the darkly comedic tableau that was our opener, you need to know about K's overall condition.
The poor woman cannot weigh more than about 95 pounds, and before the discovery of her cancer, she already had a significant curvature in her spine due to osteoporosis. This "hump" was made much more severe by her inability to sit up straight because of lack of strength and fatigue. She had undergone a mastectomy early in her cancer treatment to try and stop it's spread. This operation had not only disfigured her, it had failed. She also has a port of types under the skin on her chest which was installed to deliver her chemotherapy, and is still used as the site where she receives other injectable medicines. It kind of looks like the plug on the end of any power chord, only with short numbs instead of prongs. And it's under her skin, which is not only disconcerting, but pretty unattractive to look at. K's belly was terribly distended due to a constant battle between constipation and diarrhea, and a lack of eating or drinking. She is not a large framed person, and she was devoid of nearly all of her hair as a result of radiation.
In short- she sort of resembles a baby bird, only slightly more pathetic. So now I have K in the shower on her shower chair (she is not steady enough to stand up for long periods of time without a walker, especially slippery wet ones), and I'm getting her cleaned up, and the poor thing is FREEZING. She is devoid of all body mass practically, and because she's not standing in the warm flow of water, all the water drops are evaporating off of her as I'm trying to get her clean. She is shaking like a leaf in the wind, and I'm trying to go fast, so I can get her dry and dressed again soon, and in the process, I drop the sprayer, which promplty hits the floor of the shower, facing up, spraying me up my front as it falls, from the crotch to the face. At this point, K is not only exhausted from our battle against incontinence and the shower, but her usually preternaturally good attitude is rapidly drainig because she got sprayed in the face, too.
This is where you came in. I was able to recover the sprayer without much more fuss and get K dressed and back in bed reasonably quickly, and though it was May, and a warm day at that, she very much reminded me of getting into flannel jammies and sheets after a shower in the dead of December. That thawing feeling that you get that is so blissful after you've been chilled- you know the one. Also, I was able to rinse out the pajama pants and floor mat and wash them, and they recovered beautifully.
I choose this story to tell instead of others that I could for one main reason. As I was drying her off, her poor body shivering with cold, I was struck by a phrase that my CLFM teacher had used when describing God as He appeared to Moses on the mountain after the exodus from Egypt. Moses asks to see God's face, to which God replies:
"I will make all my goodness pass before your face, and I will proclaim the Lord by name before you; I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy.” But he added, “You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.” The Lord said, “Here is a place by me; you will station yourself on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and will cover you with my hand while I pass by. Then I will take away my hand, and you will see my back, but my face must not be seen.”
Our teacher talked about God having a "great and terrible beauty". God's face is the face of love in the fullest and truest sense, but it is also so mighty and so completely pure that to just look at it would kill a human. The same concept can be used to describe a deadly animal with a beautiful coat or set of feathers- but this phrase flashed in my head while helping K get dressed. Why? Well, two reasons.
K used to be a dancer, and we often talk shop, since I used to dance as well. She talks about her time with great joy, as we all do when we remember something we loved so much. As I was helping her get into her adult diapers and put pajamas on, I was granted the opportunity to be very up close and personal with the body I was dressing. Even more than a year after discovering cancer and starting treatment, even in the horribly depreciated state that she's in, K's old dance muscles are still visible as she flexes her feet to bend into her pants. Her long and slender biceps are still hard as a rock as she lifts herself into a comfortable position in bed. Her bones are riddled with cancer, so much so that even run of the mill tests are considered too dangerous to run on her bones, for fear that they would simply shatter. But she bends, she stretches, and she moves. Her hands and feet still possess the kind of quiet grace that someone of an acient soul and strong heart have. She is unattractive to look at by any standards, grostesquely so, but there is so much REAL beauty there. The human body is capable of prodigous strength and ability, and that vast capability is beautiful and terrible.
The other reason I was struck was by K's mind. Through HEAVY doses of narcotics to try and deal with pain, and constant fatigue and the natural mal-nourishment that accompanies dying this way, she was still what I would consider extremely lucid. She asked and answered questions, had things she wanted to say and do, and still had enough energy to get a little bossy about how her house was being cared for. She has spunk and verve and is really an incredibly sweet woman. K managed, with cancer and morphine competing for her brain cells, to fight senility long enough to get her house painted after external repairs, and make decisions about her end-of-life medical care by herself, as well as help get schedules squared away to get her son moved in with her. She is terribly beautiful, inside and out.
I regret to have to report that in the last few weeks, she has declined much more rapidly than before, and is no longer nearly so lucid, and is sleeping between 20-22 hours a day, leaning towards the latter more often than not. I have been here since 6 am today, and it's now nearly 2:30, and I woke her up long enough to go to the bathroom and take her pills, and the hospice home health aid came and gave her a quick sponge bath. My guess is that totaled with a very brief visit from a close friend, she has been awake less than an hour today so far.
In all likelihood, K will not live out the month. And I have grown to quickly love and care very deeply for this woman, and though they have been long and tiring and excruciating at times, I will miss my hours with her dearly. I already do.
If there was a "point" to this posting, it was to share with my friends how I have been spending my summer, and because the thought struck me as relating back to the title of my blog- of course He's not safe, but He's good. I think that this idea and the idea of terrible beauty go together. The longer you think about one, the more you can't let go of the other.
We often wait for God to speak to us as believers, to move in some obvious and clear way, and though in my experience, He's a little more subtle than that, sometimes He goes for the show. I have learned, and am continuing to experience, though, that even when He puts it right under our noses, God's method is usually so profound, that it ends up playing less mariachi band and more Amos Lee.
Even typing this blog, I look down at my hands and I realize how much the great and terribly beautiful God of forever loves me to have made me with fingers that work so well with so many intricate parts. Even the cramp in my wrist is a result of the kind of crafstmanship and artistry only made possible by complete and utter love and power. And it is terribly beautiful.
http://www.nationalbreastcancer.org/
