A Breeze for Yolanda

In. Out. With my hands clenched together before my nose, breathing so deeply sends a hot breeze onto my chilled fingers. nnnHH. HHnnnn. I send. You hope. I send. You strength. I send. You love. 

Airy-fairy Eastern wisdom Buddhist bullshit? It doesn’t matter, not even in my logical, scientific heart of hearts. Sending messages into the air—that’s all I can think to do. It is 4 a.m on a cold February night. I am awake with an awful foreboding, a knowing that my kid sister Yolanda, my only remaining relative, is in intractable pain. I am home in bed. She is in D Hospital doing her best to recover from surgery to remove cancer from most of her gut.

It started like the flu. We both got sick the same day. Stuff like that happens when you move back in after your folks die and your logical, scientific bent has cost you a marriage and a house, and your sister needs financial help, especially when you’ve just retired. And with Yo’s modest, reclusive profession of advising seekers of wisdom—all the more modest and reclusive since Covid came—she needed the help.

I recovered slowly, but she got worse. Nausea and belly pain kept her from eating for a month before she allowed me to take her to the ER. She’s that much against conventional medicine. She never does recommended screenings. She doesn’t believe in them.

In the ER, a CT scan disclosed tumors in the liver and that her right lung had collapsed.

Yo told me before the doctor did, but indirectly. “I have a situation,” she said softly.

“What is it? What’s the diagnosis?” I said.

“I can’t say it,” she said.

I braced myself and left her bedside to find the internist taking care of her. Dr. Weiner could say it: cancer.

To reinflate the lung, a chest tube was inserted with an opioid as a pre-medication. But we knew she was oversensitive to sedating drugs ever since an episode she had at the dentist’s as a kid. It was a Saturday morning when Yoyo was eight and I was thirteen. I saw her walking along the sidewalk toward home, but she weaved and stopped to rest with her hands on her knees. I ran out to help her, and she threw up on me. After the opioid in the ER, she got nauseated and said she felt spacey and woozy. The woman absolutely hates feeling woozy.

Has she refused pain meds in the middle of the night? Has she yanked out the chest tube—no, tubes, there are two of them now—in her agony? This is the third one the surgeons have placed in her right lung. Yo asked them to remove the first one because it hurt her to breathe or raise her right arm. But when it was removed after the colon surgery, the lung collapsed again. The second one caused worse pain. The surgeons promised to replace it yesterday, but the resident who examined Yo decided instead to leave it and insert an additional one to inflate her lung better. The combination of the second and third ones hurt so much it made it impossible for Yo to use her right arm at all.

My foreboding is not irrational. Every night since surgery six days ago, Yo has had an emergency. The chest tube caused most of them. Some nights, suction to the tube failed and Yo got frighteningly short of breath. Other nights, pain meds failed. A local anesthetic patch applied to the area on her upper back near the tube began to burn so badly that Yo later told me, “I said six cuss words. I was going to call the Fire Department.” Ten minutes after it was removed, she started feeling better.

Around midnight the next night, a different analgesic patch caused the same reaction. She called me, and I ran into the hospital. We got it pulled off, but Yo was exhausted and desperate by then. The stoic woman, her wasted facial muscles clenched, looked at me as I held her hand and said, “I’m feeling vulnerable.” The toughie, I know she meant “afraid” but wouldn’t accept such feelings.

After all, this is the woman who, immediately after being told she had metastatic cancer, floored me with her acceptance by saying, “All I want is peace;” the same woman who accepted nothing for pain since the abdominal surgery but Tylenol®.

Of fricking course, she was feeling “vulnerable!” I looked in her eyes with all the love I have, nodded and said, “Of course you do” and added some bullshit like “Just breathe” or “It will go away soon,” whatever I could to comfort her. By 1 a.m., the pain must have slacked off because she fell asleep.

Is there any road to the post-op recovery of strength that Yo needs to face her uncertain future? She was slender before she got ill, and she must have lost twenty pounds by now. The foreshortened gut is starting to work again, but she still can’t eat more than a few hundred calories a day. The pain from the chest tube spoils what appetite she has, another worry on top of the others.

Enough of sending my idiotic thought messages into the air, I think, beside myself with worry. Enough of this irrational foreboding. I demand to stop thinking such thoughts: there is a logical alternative! I throw my covers back, stand up, and head for the kitchen to check my cell phone. The nurse or a doctor on call would ring me if Yo couldn’t take it anymore and demanded to leave against medical advice.

Does the nurse have my number? Of course, she does. I gave it when we registered in the ER. After the patch disasters, I made sure it was posted in Yo’s room, too. I get to our messy old kitchen. I watch my footing because purses and packages lie here and there, strewn heedlessly in Yo’s absence. I look at my cell phone plugged into the charger. There are no text messages, no incoming phone calls at all.

I will myself to feel relief that Y has not demanded to leave the hospital. But the foreboding, the feeling that Yo is in horrible pain, steals over me again. Now I’m the one who can’t say it—who is too afraid to call the nurses’ station and ask if my foreboding is true.

Or is the foreboding false? Am I falling into the senseless, hopeless worry of one who cannot do anything to help his best friend ever in the whole world, who also happens to be his sister, when she is most in need?

That reminds me of something. Yesterday, reading her book The Wise Heart by someone named Jack Kornfield aloud to her, inwardly stifling my skepticism to sound hopeful, I came to a passage about a woman who had come to the author for help because her husband had pancreatic cancer and she couldn’t stop worrying about him night and day. Worrying doesn’t help, she knew. Mindfulness—identifying her thoughts as worries, getting some perspective by witnessing the worries, didn’t help, either. She was in a vicious cycle.

But I knew there would be some resolution, because every damn story in the book about Buddhist psychology has a happy—or at least serene—ending. I suspected that many unhappy endings were left out. But what did Jack tell the terrified woman?

To my agony, I can’t remember! Tears come to my eyes about my helplessness. Something cracks open inside. I suppose Jack told her that the outcome was out of her hands. Or that worries are always about the future, whereas the present moment is all we really have to deal with. Or to summon the peace that is always available inside us if we reach for it. That’s what he told others who were in mental trouble.

Bullshit or not, that helps. I return to bed. I do the breathing again. I’ve got to write this down, I tell myself. It’s the truest short story I may ever write.

Nah, people won’t want to read it, my perpetual companion the skeptic says. Remember how your two friends avoided your eyes when you talked to them yesterday about Yo?  All they could do was put a hand on your shoulder and voice hollow platitudes. “This too shall pass.” Or “life goes on.”

I reply to the skeptic, I don’t care if no one wants to read it! I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to stare pain and powerlessness and death in the face. The tears return. I want to run away. But there is no running away from this.  Sobs come. They subside. I can do this. I can do this for Yo. I have done it so far, and I will continue to do it. For Yolanda. For as long as she needs.

I sigh. Maybe she slept tonight for the first time. Who knows? I’ll find out later. Meantime, till visiting hours begin, I return to sending thought-waves. I send. You hope. I send. You strength. I send. You love. The out-breath on my clasped, pleading hands feels warm. Praying like this doesn’t seem airy-fairy anymore.