A Jon Post
I met a young mother in the hospital last week. I was there preparing to bring four OTHER women into Casa Ahavá and one of the oncologists pulled me into the conference room and told me about this woman with breast cancer.
“Can you take her too?” asked the oncologist.
“I’ve no space” came my tired and overused reply.
But I found myself walking the hallway to this young mother’s room anyway. I found myself at the foot of her bed, opening her file, seeing the familiar doctor scrawl across the “diagnosis” line, and feeling the familiar drop in my chest as I read what I already knew;
Breast cancer.
She was on the phone with her daughter when I came in.
Her daughter is 7 years old.
I heard the joy and pain in her voice as she asked how her daughter was doing in school and if she was obeying her grandmother. I heard her end the phone call with the tired lie “I will be home soon.”
I asked her about her daughter she immediately told me of her wonderful little girl and how much she misses her. How long it’s been since she was with her and how important it is for her to be in her school.
Unspoken but understood was the fear that she may not see her daughter again.
Unspoken but understood was the resignation to the pain of chemotherapy and its unrelenting assault on a body already broken by cancer.
Now she sits in front of me in a hospital bed, pleading for mercy and a bed in my home and I tell her, “Wait, sister. Wait. The work is not yet finished.”
Riverbeds carved in flesh from tears and the secretions of necrotic wounds mark her cheeks and her side, and she nods her head in understanding.
She will endure.
She will wait.
She has no other options.
Her far away home offers witchcraft and lies as a cures for splitting DNA and cells with too many nuclei that multiply and multiply and poison her blood and her lymphatic system. Witchcraft chants and smelly herbs in a dark mud hut and a man dressed in traditional clothing promised her the mass of tissue swelling in her breast would reduce and she gave him her money and her soul and she left feeling empty and used.
Here at the hospital a combination of Fluorouracil, Cisplatin, and pain drip into her swollen forearm. They promise tumor reduction, dead DNA strands, halted cell division, nausea, Nephrotoxicity, loneliness, depression, and homesickness.
“Wait, sister. Wait. The work is not yet finished.”
I stare at my hands after I’ve uttered those words and wonder if there can be any comfort in them.
I have four women staying in my home and I’ve promised beds to two others.
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- Maria
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- Falgeira
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- Anabela
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- Pulena
And this sister looks at me and asks for rescue from the bed she sits on. Rescue from a bed covered in old white sheets, stained with blood, vomit and emotions.
“We are building a home for you my sister.”
Next week we will open the ground of our 40×45 meter square of dirt and begin laying sand, stones, and concrete into it so that this dear sister can come and live here too.
Last week we invited four women out of the hospital into Casa Ahavá and I met 4 others whom I could not invite.
We are building a home. I hope it finishes soon.
