Home for Thanksgiving

I never made it home for Thanksgiving that year, although I’d been looking forward to it all fall semester.

I was an assistant professor, not a student, at that point and hadn’t lived in my parents’ house for many years. My husband Paul had grown up Catholic and I’d grown up Jewish, so decisions about where to spend the holidays were easy. We spent Christmas with his family, while I claimed Thanksgiving for mine. I’d left home for college right after I turned seventeen; after college, there’d been grad school, and then two post-docs, and finally a faculty position. Each stage in my training had involved a move to some place far from the town where I’d grown up and where my parents still lived. Married, hoping for a baby, and with a “real” job, I’d long since outgrown the need to get away from home and had come to regret the distance from family my career had imposed. I’d skipped Thanksgiving some years, when my work demanded it, but, as I’d gotten older, the pull of family had gotten stronger and, these days, I always tried to get back to see my parents.

It was in early November, just a few weeks before Thanksgiving, that I learned I had a pleural reaction.

The gastroenterologist had ordered a small bowel follow-through, a procedure in which I’d gotten X-rayed after downing some barium.  I’d been anemic for nearly a year, and the small bowel follow-through was intended to reveal intestinal abnormalities that could lead to chronic blood loss. The gastroenterologist was pleased with my intestines (which had looked surprisingly like a telephone cord) and he wasn’t particularly worried about the pleural reaction, which showed up as an incidental finding. He hadn’t, after all, been looking for lung problems. But if I had any pulmonary symptoms, he’d said, I might want to get a chest X-ray.

I did have some pulmonary symptoms, but nothing that seemed too alarming: I was short of breath, but that could be explained by the anemia. I had a slight cough, but it was November and everybody had a cough. I was exhausted and had been losing weight, but that had nothing to do with my lungs. Swamped at work and loath to expose myself to more X-rays, I thought about letting it go. But we were planning to see my parents for Thanksgiving and, although neither of them would have admitted it, they were starting to slow down. For the past few years, in fact, they’d been vacillating about hosting Thanksgiving dinner and we’d been going out to eat instead of having turkey at home. They were getting old, and the idea of exposing them to some pathogen gave me license to indulge the hypochondria I’d been holding in check. If it turned out I had pneumonia—or, heaven forbid, TB—I didn’t want to bring it along.

My primary care physician wasn’t too concerned either. He’d chalked up the anemia to my gender, and the exhaustion and weight loss to the stress of my baffling infertility and demanding job. But, good-naturedly, he humored my request for a chest X-ray and I went in for it the next afternoon. My physician called that evening; his voice shaking, he told me something was wrong. Very wrong. The CAT scan I got the next day revealed a mass the size of a twenty-week pregnancy nestled between my ribs and crushing my right lung flat.

Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with lymphoma.

After the leisurely run-up to diagnosis, things started moving fast. I was relieved of teaching duties and whisked into treatment. Paul and I spent Thanksgiving alone, neither of us feeling very festive. The oncologist had said there was no time to lose, not even time to harvest some eggs, and I’d already had my first round of chemo. My parents, who had driven five hours to be with me for that first treatment, were concerned about how their ten-year-old car would hold up to that long drive through the winter. They bought a new one: a red Mercury Cougar, which they drove to the hospital every three weeks for the rest of my sessions.  

With each treatment, the tumor melted away. By the following Thanksgiving, I was nearly back to my old self. In some ways, more than my old self: released from cachexia, I’d become plump as a turkey, nearly doubling my pre-treatment weight. My parents were cheerful as we went out for Thanksgiving dinner, my mother deftly deflecting my sister-in-law’s attempt to turn the conversation to retirement communities. My father was still working as a consultant, and my mother had a mail order business in Asian books and art. They weren’t ready to retire. They liked their home, the house where they’d been living some forty-odd years, and they didn’t want to hang out with a bunch of old people.

When we left the next day, my mother, disappointed she had no turkey and stuffing to give us, ransacked the cupboards for food. As we walked out the door, she tucked a jar of macadamia nuts into Paul’s pocket. Eyeing my figure, she said, “These are for you; don’t let Elizabeth at them.” 

It was the last thing I ever heard her say as the mother I’d always known.

Two weeks later, a blood vessel in her brain ruptured. She was in a coma for months, finally emerging into a profoundly damaged consciousness. My father hung on long enough to see her transferred from the hospital to a rehab facility and then—to everyone’s dismay—insisted on checking himself into a nursing home. Eventually, the two of them relocated to a nursing home near my sister; I visited every weekend. My father had given me the Cougar by then, but it was a three-hour trip and I usually took the bus. I got to know the route well enough that when a new driver, clearly lost, took the bus and its terrified passengers on an unplanned excursion through the back roads of New England, I stepped in as navigator.

That winter break, a year after my mother’s stroke, I was waiting at the bus station, when one of my students spotted me. “Hi, Professor Adler,” he said, coming over, “Are you heading for home?”

“No,” I said, “I’m going to visit someone. I live here year round.”

I was amused that he assumed that, like him, my real home was elsewhere. It only occurred to me later that, at some level, I’d still thought of my parents’ house as “home.” From now on, my only home would be the one Paul and I made together.

Several days later, Paul and I set off on our much-deferred Christmas visit to Paul’s family. My father died while we were on our way back to the college.   

Twenty years later, I recognize that, although I didn’t see it that way at the time, there are things from that year between my diagnosis and my mother’s stroke for which I am thankful. I’m thankful, of course, I survived. I’m thankful my holiday plans got me diagnosed before it was too late. I’m thankful I fell into a clinical trial that likely saved my life. I’m thankful my illness gave me time with my parents during the last year of their normal existence. I’m thankful Paul, with whom I now host Thanksgiving, was there throughout it all.

Most of all, I am thankful I got to spend that last Thanksgiving at home. 

Following her diagnoses with lymphoma and breast cancer almost 20 years ago, Elizabeth M. Adler, PhD, shifted her focus from science research to science communication. In Living with Lymphoma, she combines her scientific expertise and personal knowledge with a desire to help other people who have lymphoma manage this complex and often baffling disease.