Jane Has Cancer

By Jennifer Gresko

Heart-wrenching tale of two young girls struggling to find meaning and peace from a devastating twist of events

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781329127326

Book preview

Jane Has Cancer

Jane Has Cancer

Jennifer Gresko

Also by Jennifer Gresko

Love After Fifth Avenue

Lullabies, Liquor and Late Nights

*This book is dedicated to my mom, who believed in me more than anyone and to whom I owe my life.

To Joni, who always made me laugh when I wanted to cry and who I will always carry with me in my heart. And to Woody, who taught me about nature and how to couch like a sofa ninja. All of you may have lost your battle with cancer, but you have shown me what life is truly about and made me the person I am today.

I love you all.

Copyright@ 2009 Jennifer Leitch Gresko

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Jennifer Leitch Gresko

ISBN: 978-1-329-12732-6

Chapter 1…Diagnosis

"If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally:

give up, or fight like hell."

~Lance Armstrong

Her mouth wouldn’t close, her eyes were already

swelling up with tears and she crumbled into the hard plastic hospital room chair, unable to hold herself up anymore. The doctor walked out of the room to give her some time to let it all sink in - he had just told her you have cancer… Ok, maybe not in those exact words. It was more like we have completed the biopsy on the mass that we found in your neck and it tested positive for metastatic lung cancer.

But what we heard was, YOU HAVE CANCER.

The not so funny thing was that it didn’t just hit her like a ton of bricks, it hit me as well.

This was not just some girl I had met at the grocery store yesterday and helped carry her bags to her car; this was my best friend. No, not just my best friend, this was a girl who I considered my 3rd sister.

The one I would borrow clothes and shoes from when my wardrobe just wasn’t good enough, and the one I would sit up for hours with talking about nothing and everything at the same time. This was my Janie.

We had been tied at the hip from the moment we met, standing in the cafeteria on my first day of Jr. High, waiting for what our school was trying to pawn off as a well-balanced lunch.

Being as no one had talked to me at all on that awkward first day at my new school, I wasn’t expecting to make many friends, but she immediately took me under her wing and made me feel like we had been linked for years. It was because of her that I even survived high school and all of its disenchanting glory.

She always kept me grounded when I got out of hand and kept me in check when my ego was climbing the charts. She seemed to have everything figured out while I was always lost somewhere in the clouds. She was the one I would cry to when I was having a fight with my inconsequential boyfriend because she would bring out a tub of my favorite chocolate peanut butter ice cream, pop in a cheesy chick flick, all the while telling me to suck it up, he is only a stupid boy and not worth your tears.

And now, to sit here in this cold white room with her and see her own tears flowing down her face, what was I supposed to say, "suck it up, its only cancer".

CANCER.

We didn’t even really know what that word meant.

I don’t think you ever really think about it until it hits you close to home. I always thought that cancer was a word reserved for older people or someone you didn’t know. A word meant to scare you into wearing sunscreen, or quitting smoking.

I never really thought of it as a reality. Not a reality that we would ever have to deal with anyway.

Jane was a young girl, well older than me, but still young. As a matter of fact, we had just celebrated her 27th birthday just last week. It was such a joyful day with cake and ice cream and happy memories. That seemed to be an eternity ago, the way time had sputtered to a halt for those of us scattered randomly around Jane’s hospital bed, getting the worst possible news ever.

CANCER!

What the hell? It just made me want to scream!

We will be running some more tests this evening, and then we can let you know more information. The doctor stated as he was exiting the now silent room. His words were so calculated, as if he had practiced them a million times before. I think I might have even noticed a tiny smile on his face as he turned to walk away.

No, that couldn’t be right, I must be seeing things.

No one is that heartless, right?

Looking around the room, the friendly faces I had known for years were all blank and horrified; no smiles here. No one spoke, and no one could take their eyes off of Jane. She was the only one who looked somewhat calm, but that was probably more out of shock than actual peace.

She folded her legs up under her body on the bed and turned back towards her sister to continue the insignificant conversation they were having before the doctor interrupted with his devastating proclamation. Gently twirling her hair around her finger, and not quite making eye contact with anyone, she went on talking about the new German shepherd puppy she had just picked up from the SPCA and aptly named Winifred (which means peaceful friend in German).

She was trying to pretend like all of that had not just transpired; hoping it would all go away if no one talked about it. However, looking closely, I could see her hand, tightly tangled in her blonde locks, shaking with panic.

Her hard exterior was also being spoiled by the tears that she couldn’t stop from falling down her cheek every few seconds. As quickly as she could, she brushed them away with the hand that wasn’t intertwined in her hair and kept on talking, hoping no one would see them. That attempt was futile nonetheless, seeing as every pair of eyes in the room was completely fixated on her right now.

I know it annoyed her that she was crying; she hated being a spectacle for any reason. She wouldn’t even give her name at restaurants because she was afraid people would look at her funny. The center of attention was not at all where she wanted to be. But sometimes no matter what you tell your brain, your heart has a mind of its own that you can’t control. And tears fall regardless of how hard you try to wish them away.

There had to be some mistake. I just couldn’t contemplate the reality of this diagnosis. Jane was one of the strongest, healthiest people I knew. Always eating salads when the rest of us went out for pizza, taking a multi-vitamin every day since she was 12, drinking water religiously and even taking up running a year ago – for fun!

Who runs for fun??

But she was serious about it.

Every summer, when we were set free from school and able to drive ourselves around without parental supervision, we went away for our annual girl’s beach weekend; just me, Jane and our two other amigos, Taylor and Mary. It was our sabbatical from all of the drivel life hands you as a teenager. And for me, it was my one and only trip for the entire summer, since our family stopped taking vacations when I turned nine. My mother was raising four kids by herself and after food and shelter, there seemed to be a lack of sufficient funds for traveling.

I didn’t feel bad though, we had all grown up rather humbly, so I wasn’t the only one who diligently saved up for this vacation all year long. And when you’re saving your own money, money you painstakingly worked for stocking shelves and bagging groceries for minimum wage, it felt good to get away and spend that hard earned dough however the reckless teenage wind blew.

These weekends together were vital to our friendship as we got older and went through different stages of our lives. It’s hard enough to keep the same girlfriend from the time you are a naive teenager into womanhood, let alone the same three girlfriends, but we were determined that nothing was going to stop us from being friends for life.

Sleeping late at the beach was a pre-requisite, since with school and work, you could never sleep in. However, on the first morning of last year’s vacation, at roughly 5 am, while three of us were happily snoozing in the unkempt motel beds, Jane got up, put on her sneakers and went out to run on the boardwalk.

I mean, this was vacation, and there she was, up before the sun, running. We ate junk food and laid around all day, we didn’t run. In fact, neither exercise nor eating healthy were ever included in our beach agenda, you just don’t think like that when you are young. But that’s just who she was. She took on the world every chance she got.

And now, with the declaration of one immeasurably nauseating word, the world was taking its shot at her, while her back was turned.

How could this girl have cancer?

Like I said, there must be some mistake.

We all took refuge, rather impatiently, in her hospital room for hours upon hours, hoping the doctors would return and tell us, Ha, ha, gotcha! We were just kidding.

A cruel joke, yes, but not as cruel as all of this nonsense being true.

They ran tests all night long, poking and probing her, taking vials of blood, doing CAT scans and MRI’s as we sat in her room and waited; waited for some answer that could possibly make more sense than this.

None of us really said much of anything for those  agonizing hours we were waiting with her, nothing worth remembering anyway.

What was there to say?

Casual small talk got us through the time, but no one dared to mention the reason we were all there. Luckily, her family was overflowing with women who had no problem talking about anything and everything. I believe the weather was mentioned a few times, it’s always a safe conversation.

Oh yes, crazy isn’t it? It was so warm out this afternoon that I almost turned on my air conditioner! Tammy, Jane’s mother, was having a trivial conversation with one of the random nurses coming in and out of our curtained area.

It was surprisingly hot for it being March, but no one really cared about that. It just provided something to fill the void of silence that none of us wanted to abide.

Jane looked exactly like her mother, a younger model, yes, but almost an exact replica. She was her polar opposite in every other way, but they shared the same beautiful face. Tammy had Jane when she was sixteen, so she was still rather young, but today’s events had aged her face substantially. And raising the girls alone after her husband walked out on them put a few wrinkles on her brow as well. You could tell she was exhausted, even with her upbeat attitude.

I turned my head around to see the faces of my three best friends, scattered throughout the mess of people engulfing the room. The girls who knew me better than I knew myself and loved me anyway.

Taylor was listening to the conversation Jane and her sister Lucy were having, but not joining in at all. Her face was absent. Mary was on my right side, holding the same stature as Taylor, but immersed in a conversation with one of Jane’s crazy aunts about a trip she had just taken to New Zealand.

We had all been invited to this extremely personal moment in our friend’s life, and I could see that they were as terrified as I was at this moment.

We were just young girls, we didn’t know how to handle something as prevailing as this. We were supposed to be starting our lives, not being put face to face with their untimely end.

My stomach flipped upside down and wrenched around inside of me. I felt like I could throw up and cry all at once, but this really wasn’t the time for me to lose it. Not now. There would be time for that later, when I was alone.

When all of the tests were concluded, and the sun had set on this murky day, the end result was that – even though she came in for a pain in her neck – she was walking out of there with stage four metastatic lung cancer.

She was also walking out of there with a packet that explained just exactly what stage four lung cancer was, precisely. For those like me, who have no idea, to put it graciously: it’s not a good thing. Ok, so cancer is NEVER a good thing, but this, as far as her packet and the internet could tell us, was basically a death sentence.

Apparently there are four assigned stages of cancer (the final one being stage four) and metastatic meant that it was spread to not only her lungs; it was in her liver, her kidneys and in her blood. It was everywhere.

How could that be?

She looked as healthy as a horse – a horse that most certainly did NOT have cancer!

Other than the pain in her neck, she had no other symptoms of anything being physically wrong with her, unless you counted the tears streaming down her face.

I kept thinking that it should have been me sitting there on that bed, getting this news. Not that I wanted this, no one wants this, but I deserved it way more than Jane. She was such a better person than I was, so strong and altruistic, constantly taking care of everyone else around her without asking for a thing in return.

I was always so wrapped up in my own little world to care about the problems of others. Even now, I was thinking about myself, how this was affecting my life.

It really should be me, not her.

The doctors finally let her go home after their wide array of incessant testing. We reluctantly said our goodbyes, never wanting to really say goodbye, because goodbye could mean forever at a time like this, couldn’t it?

No, no, no! I will not let myself think like that!

Everything is going to be alright. It has to be