Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [54]
“I should have taken more medicine. Now nothing works.” When your wife had diarrhea, she stopped eating. You didn’t understand how someone could stop eating for days. You ignored it when you were younger; not until you were older did you ever ask if she should eat something. Then your wife would say, with a miserable expression, “Animals don’t eat when they’re sick. Cows, pigs … when they’re sick they stop eating. Even chickens. The dog stops eating when it’s sick. When it’s sick, it doesn’t look at food, even if I give it something good, and it digs a hole in front of its house and lies down in there. A few days later, it’ll get up. And that’s when it will eat. People are the same way. My stomach is not feeling well, and even if the food is great, it’s like poison when it gets inside me.”
When the diarrhea didn’t stop, she would grate dried persimmons and eat a spoonful. She would refuse to go to the hospital. “How can dried persimmons be medicine? Go to the hospital, and see the doctor, and get medicine from the pharmacy,” you urged her, but she didn’t listen. Finally, if you insisted, she would snap, “Didn’t I say I wasn’t going to the hospital?” and wouldn’t let you bring it up again.
One year, you left home in the summer and returned in the winter, and when you got back you found a lump in your wife’s left breast. You remarked that it wasn’t normal, but your wife wasn’t moved. Only when her nipple caved in and was filled with discharge did you take her to the hospital in town, her work towel still wrapped around her head. They couldn’t tell you what it was right away, but examined her and said it would take ten days to get the results back. Your wife sighed. What happened during those ten days? What were you doing that was so important that you didn’t go back to hear the results? Why did you put off going back to find out what was wrong? Finally, when her nipple became abscessed, you took your wife and went back to the hospital. The doctor said your wife had breast cancer.
“Cancer?” Your wife said that it was impossible: she didn’t have time to lie in bed sick, she had too much to do. The doctor explained that your wife didn’t fit the profile for a high risk of breast cancer. She hadn’t had children late in life, she breastfed all five children, she didn’t get her period when she was very young, since she got it the year she married you, and she didn’t enjoy meat—in fact, she couldn’t afford to. But cancer cells were growing in your wife’s left breast. If you had gone back to hear the results right away, they might not have had to cut off her breast. Soon after the surgery, her chest still wrapped with bandages, your wife planted potatoes in the field. Burying the sprouted potatoes in the field—which now belonged to someone else, because you’d sold it to pay for the surgery—she declared, “I will never go to the hospital again!” Not only did she refuse to go to the hospital, but she also wouldn’t let you come near her.
Around the time you were to go to Seoul for your birthday, your wife was suffering from stomach problems. You worried whether she could go to Seoul if she was so weak, but she asked you to go to town to buy bananas, having heard about some remedy or other. Before you went to Seoul, she ate a mixture of two dried persimmons and half a banana for three meals straight. Even though she’d never stayed in bed for more than a week after giving birth, she was laid up in bed for ten days with the occasional stomach problem. And your wife started