Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [62]
Or and I drove Katrin to the hospital. While we were waiting to fill out forms, she kept joking around—“Get me a good wig, Amy. I’ve always wanted nice hair”—and apologizing for taking up so much of my time. When we finally got to her hospital room—on the other side of a curtain was a deathly-looking elderly woman who’d obviously been through some chemotherapy—the first thing Katrin did was put up pictures of her family. There was a close-up of Ella, one of Jake at age three, and one of the four of them beaming on a tennis court. Although she looked distracted now and then, Katrin seemed completely calm and deliberate.
By contrast, when two medical interns—one was Asian, the other Nigerian—came to introduce themselves to Katrin, I was overwhelmed with indignation and rage. It was as if they were playing doctor. They had no answers to any of our questions, they twice referred to the wrong kind of leukemia, and Katrin ended up having to explain to them the protocol they needed to follow that night. All I could think was, Students? My sister’s life is in the hands of medical students?
But Katrin’s reaction was totally different. “I can’t believe that the last time I was in this building, I was one of them,” she said thoughtfully after the interns left, just a hint of sadness in her voice. “Or and I had just met.”
The initial few weeks of chemo went smoothly. As we’d seen with Florence, the effects of chemo are cumulative, and in the first several days Katrin said she felt terrific—in fact, more energetic than she’d felt in months because they were giving her regular blood transfusions to counter her anemia. She spent her time writing scientific papers (one of which was published by Cell while she was in the hospital), supervising her lab at Stanford long-distance, and buying books, toys, and winter clothes for Jake and Ella over the Internet.
Even after Katrin started feeling the effects of the chemo, she never complained, not about the Hickman line inserted into her chest that carried chemical toxins straight from a drip to her major veins (“Not bad, but I still can’t look at it”); or the shivering fevers she’d suddenly get; or the hundreds of injections, pills, and needle pricks she had to endure. All the while, Katrin sent me funny e-mails that sometimes made me laugh aloud. “Yay!” she wrote once. “Starting to feel SICK. Chemo is working . . . all according to plan.” And another time: “I am looking forward to the phlebotomist visiting me this a.m. This is what I am reduced to.” The phlebotomist was the person who drew her blood and told her what her blood counts were. And: “Able to drink clear fluids again. Going to try chicken broth.Yum.”
I came to realize that when I didn’t hear back from Katrin—when she didn’t answer my calls or return my e-mails—she was either violently ill, swollen up with hives because of an allergic reaction to a platelet transfusion (something that happened regularly), or sedated with painkillers to blunt some horrible new affliction. Her updates, though, were always light-hearted. To my daily “How was last night?” e-mails, she’d respond, “You don’t want to know,” “Not too bad but not great at all,” or “Alas, another fever.”
I also realized something else: Katrin was determined to live for the sake of her children. Growing up, she’d always been the most focused of the four sisters, the one with the most concentration. Now she devoted every bit of her intellect and creativity to the task of battling her leukemia. Trained as a doctor, she was completely on top of her own disease, double-checking dosages, reviewing her cytogenetic reports, researching clinical trials on the Internet.