'OK, I'm ready to go now'
By MELISSA BLAKE
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mellow1422@aol.com
Blake: Exactly two weeks ago, my mother, as only she could from a post-op surgical bed at Kishwaukee Community Hospital, taught me one of those great life lessons: The joy and sheer satisfaction that comes from practicing preventative medicine. In her case, it was preventative medicine times three.
And, as only my mother could do, she made it look downright easy, as if she were starring in her own Discovery Health Channel special. Yet I wondered: If she’s being so brave, why have I become the medical-avoidant of the family?
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness month. It’s hard for me not to be aware of this potentially deadly disease. My paternal grandmother died from breast cancer when I was two, and although my maternal grandmother’s was caught early, she still had to endure painful treatments. The same with my Aunt Carol a few years ago.
So, my mother, ever vigilant, has never let her own yearly mammogram go by the wayside. For her, it’s the same as getting your car tuned up every year, or doing the dreaded spring cleaning. It’s just something you mark in red on the calendar and do.
And she did, about a month ago.
Preventative medical measure No. 1. Check.
Then, a few weeks ago, a sore tooth sent her to the dentist. I began to worry when, two hours after her appointment time, I still hadn’t heard from her, so I gave her cell phone a ring. Through slurred speech (from the Novocain, I’d realize later), she said, “I have to get a root canal.” Uh-oh. You see, my mother has a history of having a rather low pain threshold when it comes to all things dentistry, so even though this technically isn’t an example of preventative medicine, I have to give my mother a big thumb’s up. After all, she could have run out of the dentist’s office screaming and refusing to have the procedure done. She didn’t.
Preventative medical measure No. 2. Check.
And that, my friends, is how I found myself three days later in the hospital’s waiting room. My sweet mother, after two years of putting it off, had finally bitten the bullet and went under the semi-knife for her very first colonoscopy.
“She’s all done. You can come back and see her now,” the nurse told me after 45 minutes of waiting and wondering.
I found my mother, lying in the bed and half asleep with a blanket tucked gently under her chin. Before I even had the chance to pat her on the shoulder, she turned over, sat up and asked the nurse, not for some aspirin or Tylenol, but for a diet soda.
Twenty minutes, a bubbly glass of Diet Pepsi (she would have preferred Diet Coke) and a bowl of cereal later, all was right with her world again.
“OK, I’m ready to go now,” she said, as casually as if she’d just had an appointment at the hair salon instead of a colonoscopy.
Wow. This woman, I realized again, is tough.
A few days later, after she was all recovered, she told me, “I don’t know what I was so worried about. That procedure was nothing.”
I think she was trying her best to send me a subtle message, as subtle as she can be. I’ve been putting off a few medical check-ups of my own. Maybe you have too. We get to thinking if we push it aside and don’t address it, even if it ends up being nothing, then everything is alright and we have nothing to worry about. It’s a funny trick the mind plays on us, isn’t it? The wonders of modern medicine are, well, wonderful. Maybe it’s time we (especially me) took our life into our own hands. Just like my mother did.
P.S. I bought her a Bath & Body Works gift card for her colonoscopy bravery, so if you see her there in the next few weeks, you’ll know why. I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you all about it, too.
• Melissa Blake, a lifelong resident of DeKalb, is a freelance journalist and writer. She is the adviser to the Kishwaukee College newspaper, the Kaleidoscope. She can be contacted at mellow1422@aol.com.
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