Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [65]
The main source of mortality from chemotherapy is infection. Ordinary ailments like the common cold or flu can easily kill a cancer patient whose white blood cells have been destroyed. Katrin got one infection after another. To fight them, her doctors prescribed a slew of antibiotics, which caused all kinds of painful side effects, and when those antibiotics didn’t work, they tried different ones. She couldn’t eat or drink for weeks and had to be given fluids intravenously. She was always either freezing or burning up. The complications and crises kept coming, and she was often in so much agony she had to be sedated.
When the second round of chemo had been administered, we again had to hold our breath and wait. One of the ways we’d know if Katrin’s leukemia was in remission was if she starting producing healthy blood cells—in particular neutrophils, which defend against bacterial infection. I knew that Katrin’s blood was drawn first thing every morning, so I’d sit at my computer screen starting at 6:00 A.M., waiting for an e-mail from her. But Katrin no longer wrote to me. When I couldn’t stand waiting anymore and e-mailed Katrin first, I’d get terse answers like, “Counts not going up yet” or “Still nothing. Pretty disappointed.” Soon, she didn’t respond to my e-mails at all.
I’ve always wondered what’s wrong with people who don’t get the point and leave voice message after voice message (“Ca-a-ll me! Where are you? I’m worried!”) even when it’s obvious there’s a reason no one’s calling them back. Well, now I couldn’t help myself. I was too anxious to care about being annoying. The week after her second round of chemo ended, I called Katrin over and over every morning, and even though she never answered—she had caller ID, so she knew it was me—I kept leaving messages, giving her updates on useless things, imagining that I was being cheery and uplifting.
Then one morning, Katrin answered the phone. She didn’t sound like herself. Her voice was so faint I could barely hear her. I asked her how she was feeling, but she just sighed. Then she said, “It’s no use, Amy. I’m not going to make it. There’s no hope. . . . There’s just no hope,” and her voice trailed off.
“Don’t be silly, Katrin. It’s totally normal for it to take this long for counts to go up. Sometimes it can take months. Jed actually just researched all this. I can send you the numbers if you want. Also, Or tells me that the doctor is extremely optimistic. Just give it one more day.”
There was no reply, so I started up again. “Lulu is such a nightmare!” I said, and I regaled her with stories about the violin and our fights and me flipping out. Before she got sick, Katrin and I had often talked about parenting and how it was impossible for us to wield the same authority over our kids that our parents had exerted over us.
Then, to my relief, I heard Katrin laugh on the other end and say in a more normal voice, “Poor Lulu. She’s such a nice girl, Amy. You shouldn’t be so hard on her.”
On Halloween, we learned that they had located a donor, a Chinese-American who was apparently a perfect match for Katrin. Four days later, I got an e-mail from Katrin saying, “I have neutrophils! Level is 100, needs to be 500 but hopefully rising.” And they did—very slowly, but they did. In early November, Katrin was released from the hospital to regain her strength. She had exactly one month before the bone marrow transplant, which unbelievably would require yet another round of chemo—this one the mother of all chemos, administered in a special germ-free ward—to wipe out all of Katrin’s own diseased bone marrow so that the donor’s healthy marrow could replace it. Many patients never made it out of that ward.
During her month at home, Katrin seemed so happy. She enjoyed everything: feeding Ella, taking her children for walks, and just watching them sleep. Her favorite thing was to watch Jake play tennis.
The bone marrow transplant took place on Christmas Eve. My parents and my whole family