Rose's Cantina

Embed from Getty Images Like many women my age, I'm part of the sandwich generation, an army of clear-eyed women who are caregivers at both ends. By day, I've been looking after little Squishy, my granddaughter who is nearly two. On nights and weekends, I've been caring for Jennette, the cancer patient. Now that Jennette's gone, I'm feeling a little lighter, like an open-faced sandwich missing the top part of the bread. Of course, there is still much work to do in the short-term. I have a funeral to plan, music and pictures to archive, and as her executor, I have many letters to write and meetings to attend. Still, I've got a lot more free time now that her place is cleared out, and Sundays and evenings aren't spent eating fast food and drinking wine to calm the heck down. Last night, I looked at my PVR and realized that it's nearly full. I must have two months worth of Colbert and old movies to watch. Nope, too much stress. Colbert is already...

Two years ago, when Jennette began her cancer journey, we made a pact. I would help her through it, and she would let me write about it, warts and all. Today's post is not for the squeamish, but if I'm to tell her story fully, it has to be accurate and truthful. And that means talking about what the doctor's call her "smoker's tumour". Nobody is forcing you to read this blog, so feel free to click the little "x" up on the right hand side of your screen.  Otherwise, welcome to my room. Here we go. Look at this beautiful face. It's the face of the person I looked after for the past two years. Tomorrow, I am going to the funeral home and I won't be able to see that face. The funeral director urged me to allow their restoration professionals to fix her up before I come in to identify Jennette's remains. I said I didn't think that was necessary. I had been with her through palliative care, and I thought I'd seen everyt...

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The 5th floor of the Bruyere Residence in Ottawa is well known to paupers and princes. Impending death has a way of levelling the playing field like nothing anyone can imagine. Nobody on the 5th floor was making plans for 2018. My friend Jennette is in Room 508. It's a lovely room with a comfy hospital bed and large reclining chairs. The nurses seat her every day, looking towards the door; perhaps they hope that someone will come and see her. She isn't like my friend Viggo who died there recently. Viggo had a gaggle of kids, and his room was always filled with legacy. Jennette doesn't have much family to speak of and so it is up to friends to visit her. We do so with checkered regularity. Most of her friends are elderly, and on the bus, and with the wind chill setting record levels, it's hard for them to get around. Her elderly stepmom, Lois, is determined to come, to hold her and tell her she loves her so, but the fates haven't been kind to Lois of late. ...

On the eve of 2017, Jennette was looking forward to a new life, unencumbered by caregiving, armed with a new set of choppers the doctors said she would never have. Sure, she missed her dad terribly, as she did her husband who had been her wingman and drinking buddy for over 30 years. But now, she was set. Dad had left her a tidy sum in his will, and she had inherited all of his sunny Florida-themed white furniture. She had bought a new car, and had set herself up in a tidy little apartment on Kilborn Avenue, her little dream palace. Jennette had survived her own personal war. In her late middle age, she worked two jobs because Roger was too sick to work anymore (largely due to a rum and Camels habit that would have put Hemingway to shame). Soon after she retired from her job as an executive assistant for Canada's electronic spy agency, she found herself out of both jobs -- her other job in a clothing store had been stolen away when retail went bust -- and so she became...

Last week, Jennette and I had the big talk. You know the one, the talk where you set everything straight, and confess to past transgressions, lies and half-truths. If you're a caregiver for a cancer patient, you know what I'm talking about. Even the most solid gold hearted caregiver sometimes has to lie to the patient, if for no other reason than to keep heart and soul together. My big lie concerned Jennette's apartment which I had to empty out over the course of about six days when she undergoing radiation at the Ottawa Hospital. Her doctor told us that Jay needed to go into assisted living, and would no longer be able to live the swinging single life at her pad on Kilborn Avenue. The oral cancer was now Stage Four, and it was inhabiting the side of her face like a burrowed squirrel. "Unless you have someone to care for her 24/7, she might choke to death one night," he explained in that concerned oncologist voice. "You don't want to come to ...

Embed from Getty Images On a dark and crisp morning, last November, too early even for the murder of crows that normally hovers over the Ottawa Hospital, my friend Jennette and I joined a steady stream of haggard looking souls padding into the Ottawa Cancer Centre. Some people looked frightened, others simply dazed, and few looked bloody famished. My soul cried out for coffee, but it seemed rude to slurp a Starbucks in front of the unfortunates who had been fasting for hours. So I just doodled on my iPad and watched the sleepy bunch try to amuse themselves. There we sat, the friends and relatives of the cancer gang, clutching on to our loved ones or trying to be chill, reading Smart Phones, flipping through old magazines, or watching the CBC News with no sound. This was a shitty place to cool your heels. We all have that memory of our first surgery. Mine was tonsils, pretty pedestrian stuff. But on that morning, my six-year-old memory muscle...

Embed from Getty Images Last week, I received a frantic call from Jennette. "The radiologist called," she said. "He wants me to come back in." Just a week before, Jennette had received a clean bill of health, a thumbs up from both her surgeon and the radiation oncologist who both assured her that radiation wasn't required as a safety net against the return of her oral cancer which had already robbed her of part of her jaw and most of her bottom teeth. I couldn't believe it. First they give us hope, then they take it away. We returned to the Ottawa Hospital for a meeting with the radiologist who looked very sombre, almost grim. "I know I told you that you wouldn't need radiation," he began. "We had a meeting with your surgeon and the pathologist, looked over your charts at our meeting... "And something just didn't sit well with me." The cancer was too close to edge, is a simple way to say it. The surgeon c...

A month ago, my little cancer warrior headed down the corridor at the Ottawa Hospital toward an uncertain surgery in hopes of removing a malignant tumor in her mouth. It was a difficult eight-hour operation that would see the removal of part of her jaw, gums and a handful of teeth, all to be replaced with a graft from her left arm. JLove spent her Christmas and New Year's convalescing first in the observation area, then in a hospital bed. She was only able to write out her thoughts, and she could barely speak due to the fact doctors had inserted a trach tube in her mouth. The surgery went well, and though she was in a great deal of pain with a tongue the size of a grapefruit, she persevered, never complaining, grinning and raising a thumbs up on occasion. Jennette was as brave a soldier as anyone I've ever seen, and was more concerned about the trouble she was causing others. Today, we walked back into that hospital and it seemed a whole lot less scary. She met with h...

On Wednesday, my little cancer-fighting warrior Jennette Levett got the news that she was being sprung from the Ottawa Hospital after a grueling two weeks which involved an eight-hour surgery to remove the cancer, seven teeth and part of her jaw. She also had to endure a complicated procedure in which doctors took skin grafts from her arm and leg. When it was all done, the surgery rocked her world. JLev looked like a fatigued Rocky Balboa, the prize-fighting wannabee before he started punching cows. There were tubes everywhere. She was a living breathing, beeping little machine with glassy eyes and a Howdy Doody grin, sewn shut. Here she is the day after her surgery. Man, she's gonna kill me for this one.  The smartphone has made us all into mad paparazzi. She spent two weeks breathing and trying to talk through a tracheotomy, with goo being suctioned out of her on a constant basis. Her arm looked like a skinned chicken thigh, and I can't even guess what h...

I'm getting hospital withdrawal today. Every day for a week now, I've been schlepping myself down the road to visit the multi-tubal Jennette who has gone to Hell and has come out the other side, the result of her oral cancer surgery. But today, I'm snowed in, so I can only reach her by text. "They plugged up my trach," she told me. "Now I sound like Darth Vader." Yesterday, was the first day she could talk at all and it was a bit difficult to understand her. She's having to get used to a mouth that must feel like a gigantic pot of Play Do. She also lost seven teeth and part of her gum, so that's got to be hard to negotiate. Her tongue doesn't know what to do with itself. But she's a determined little lady, and she's working hard on learning to talk again, while motoring around her room on her trusted cane. I'm really amazed how fast the healing process is. The human body is wondrous in its determination to righ...

Embed from Getty Images You ask the average person when death comes knocking at their door whether they want a prick on their side or some kindergarten teacher who is going to kiss their ass. When that day comes, I want the prick! Philip Seymour Hoffman in Patch Adams "How exactly are you going to take the cancer out?" my friend asked the two surgeons who had just violated her, through her nose, with a scope. They both looked at each other, blanched, and looked back at her. "We have our methods," the female doctor said softly. It was a good question, which deserved an honest answer, but it left the doctors squirming and clearly running for cover. It was a question that my friend could have had answered if she had been a little more Internet savvy. I knew the answer; I had Googled it hours before. My friend has oral cancer, a tumor just below her tongue. Two days before Christmas, doctors will drive a backhoe through her mouth. Th...

View image | gettyimages.com Yesterday, I asked you all to pray for my friend who was having oral cancer surgery at the Ottawa Hospital. Your prayer must have worked because today she's sitting up in a cushy private room, with all her toys around her: the cell phone, a television delivered immediately to her room, and her iPad. You might say, "Wow, she looks excellent considering she had an eight hour operation which involved resecting her tiny mouse mouth. It's like they did nothing at all to her!" If you were thinking that, you would be half right. You see, she didn't have the surgery after all. That's because minutes before the surgeons were able to get  their mitts into her mouth, she fell. Fainted in the bathroom. Hit her head. I was expecting to hold her hand, look into her eyes, tell her everything was going to be cool, and then retreat to Starbucks for a bun and a cup of cappuccino. Instead, I was rushed to her bedside, as her ...

View image | gettyimages.com The cartoonist Ben Wicks and I worked together for several years on books about a bunch of strange topics: literacy, harassment in the workplace...and mutual funds. When putting together the harassment book, I asked Ben if there was any topic -- death, taxes, war -- that he couldn't take, turn on its ear, and make fun of. He thought for a moment, and then he said, "Cancer, I don't think I could make fun of cancer." A few minutes later, he handed me a bar napkin with a cartoon scribbled on it. It was a man on a bed looking up at the Grim Reaper. The caption read, "Can I get a second opinion?" There is not funny about cancer, but then, everything is funny about cancer. We have to view cancer with a twinkle in our eye, and a spring in our step. Without humor, how would we ever get through cancer? I've realized this over the last few months, as I've shepherded a dear friend through the over-bright hall...