Main Squeeze Blues
Phyllis was my soul mate — a smart, sexy, vital woman who organized our lives and those of other people too. A brutal but mercifully short bout with cancer may have taken her from me, but I’ll always have the wonderful memories of our thirty years together. And I know I’ll be seeing her again.
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But the pain in her chest got progressively worse. Realizing that the tumor was particularly aggressive and spreading fast, Sandbach decided not to wait for a second round of chemo and started her immediately on a full-bore course of radiation treatments—five days a week for six weeks. The radiation beam trained on the tumor in her chest, proved far worse than the chemo: It blistered her throat and esophagus until she could barely swallow. I assigned myself the task of measuring out her medications, which included not only la-la land doses (Sandbach’s term) of morphine and codeine but also pills for anxiety, nausea, depression, and constipation (constipation is a common side effect of large amounts of narcotics). A radiation specialist prescribed a local anesthetic solution called a triple mix—a combination of lidocaine, Tylenol, and Maalox—which, when gargled and swallowed, numbed her throat and permitted her to eat small servings of soft food. Even so, eating or sipping water was almost more than she could bear; dehydration was a serious concern. And no matter how many laxatives she took, constipation was a constant problem. As the drugs accumulated in her body, the pain began to subside, but the constipation only got worse.
On the way to M. D. Anderson with Doatsy in early May, Phyllis got it in her head that she no longer needed the pain meds, that once she stopped taking them, the constipation would take care of itself. By this time she had been on large doses of narcotics for nearly a month and, without realizing it, was addicted. The next day she went into severe narcotics withdrawal and had to be rushed to the emergency room. And then came the second opinion: A breast cancer specialist determined that the primary cancer was not in the breast, as Sandbach had believed, but in her lungs. Whatever this portended, I knew it wasn’t good.
Four days after returning from Houston, Phyllis was back at Seton, suffering from severe dehydration and malnutrition, and the staff was pumping her full of fluids and nutrients. They were also trying to adjust her meds so she would be both alert and pain free, something that was proving increasingly difficult. Phyllis pretended it was business as usual. She kept her cell phone on her bedside table and answered every call herself. Doatsy and I still laugh about the afternoon when, awakened from a deep, drug-induced sleep by the ring of her cell, she bolted upright, went into her husky businesswoman register, and began rattling off prices and square footage from memory. Another time I heard her promise to meet a client at a Town Lake town house that afternoon at three. She couldn’t make it to the bathroom without help, and now she was promising to meet a client; the narcotics were doing the talking. “Phyllis Ann,” I said in my scolding voice, “doing business is not a good idea just now.” She looked hurt. Tears welled in her eyes. It hadn’t occurred to her that something as trivial as cancer could get in the way of work.
Real estate had been a huge part of her life, and she was very good at it. “Realtor to the stars,” one journalist had labeled her. Her clients had included the actors Dennis Hopper and Diane Ladd, as well as numerous well-known writers, artists, and musicians. With no apparent effort she became friends for life with nearly every person she worked with or found or sold a house for—or just met for a drink and a laugh. She adopted people on sight. In short order she knew the names of their children and grandchildren and pets and was ringing their doorbell with gifts of toys, children’s clothing, or Milk-Bones. People knew that she would be there for them.
Phyllis’s mom, the unsinkable Lucy Mae McCallie, had arrived from her home in Wetumka, Oklahoma, and the two of us camped by her bedside from early morning until late at night. Doatsy, Dorothy Browne, and Michelle Keahey, a young realtor whom Phyllis had taken under her wing and had come to love like a younger sister, became part of our core group of caregivers. Michelle showed up in Phyllis’s room one day with an enormous stuffed dog, nearly as big as our male Airedale terrier, Willie. Phyllis named him Rufus and slept cuddled against him.
I sensed that the cancer was spreading. What appeared to be a small tumor had started to swell beneath her naked scalp. The wigs she had selected were too hot and uncomfortable, so she switched to a series of scarves and headdresses. A mysterious pain afflicted one of her knees, and, on top of everything else, a racking cough developed into pneumonia. Phyllis had already lost at least twenty pounds. Her skin sagged and her muscle mass flattened; she was virtually skin and bone, a sad relic of the stunning and curvaceous high-kicker who’d once twirled flaming batons for the Wetumka High band. I remember watching her sleep one afternoon, relieved on the one hand that she was resting peacefully but aware, too, that she was literally vanishing before my eyes.
It got worse. Toward the end of her twelve-day hospital stay, doctors ran a fiber-optic bronchoscope into her bronchial tubes and took photographs. The pictures made Doatsy and me cringe: In brilliant color, they showed splotches of blood covering one quadrant of her lungs and masses of ugly white cancer cells clumped along the base. We tried to keep them from Phyllis, but she insisted on looking for herself. The sight was too much: She had a full meltdown and needed to be sedated.
On a routine visit to Belle Hoverman’s office a day before she was supposed to go home, I learned the terrible truth: Her cancer was not curable. The cancer cells were spreading essentially unchecked, and the chemo and radiation were only making her sicker. The battle was hopeless. It was time to face up to the inevitable: She would be dead in a few months. Belle mentioned hospice care and the importance of keeping her as comfortable as possible. I thanked her and walked out to the parking lot, shaking all over.
This was the worst day of my life, or so I thought; worse days were to follow. I drove around town for a long while, thinking, praying, wondering why this had to be. Later that day, I broke the news to Doatsy and Dorothy and a few close friends. In the meantime, the staff at Seton had given Phyllis a blood transfusion, and when I walked into her room, I could hardly believe the change in her. She was sitting up, laughing and jabbering on her cell phone. She blew me a kiss and gave me one of those smiles that always buckled my knees. I knew I had to tell her the truth, but not just yet. She was due to be discharged the next day, a Saturday, and Doatsy and I decided to wait until at least Sunday night to tell her the news. Let her enjoy a day at home with her family and our beloved Airedales.
She didn’t break down the night we told her, as I had feared. Tears filled her eyes, but she looked away to another part of our bedroom and said in a dry voice, “So it wasn’t just my imagination.” She knew. But in a strange way, hearing the bad news from me somehow made it easier. Belle had told me that victims of terminal diseases often feel a sense of relief when they hear the truth. I felt relief too. For five terrible weeks I had struggled with great frustration, desperate to do something for her but never knowing exactly what. Now I knew: Help her with the end. Care for her. Make her comfortable. Protect her from pain.
Doatsy went with us to Sandbach’s office the next morning. We had already decided that additional chemo and radiation would only prolong her agony. Sandbach agreed. He was a founder of Hospice Austin, which offered a wide range of home medical and nursing care and emotional support. If we wanted him to, he would arrange everything. “How long?” Phyllis asked him. At the outside, he said softly, six months. On the way home, she told me, “I don’t want to wait six months.”
PHYLLIS AND I KNEW FROM THE MOMENT we started our lives together that we would live it to the max. Our view was, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. If we had extra money, we dismissed the practical option of a savings account and spent it on something fun, like travel. In the late seventies, just after I had signed a book contract and sold a previous book in paperback for six figures, we put the kids in boarding school and moved to Taos, New Mexico (it is not true, as I sometimes joked, that we left the boys no forwarding address). We had planned to be there a couple of months but stayed a year and a half, hiking the trails of Carson National Forest with our Airedales—we had one, two, and sometimes three of the breed most of our married life—and exploring New Mexico and Colorado. I took work trips to El Paso to research the book I was writing on the dope-dealing Chagra brothers and the murder-for-hire of federal judge John Wood, but mostly we just had fun and savored each other’s company.
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