By LAURA TIBERI
I was 63. The year of COVID was still making life and work a challenge, and not just for me. An aching pain in my right side had been relegated to the category of “annoyance,” as I work zoomed and adjusted to virtual everything. My mother had passed unexpectedly just before Christmas 2019, and by January, I had moved my father to an assisted living facility just five minutes away so I could see him almost every day and for the first few months of 2020, I did just that. We enjoyed dinner together most evenings, followed by Jeopardy and his nightly ice cream treat. His grandchildren and niece and her grandchildren visited for dinner and family gatherings. We had some joyful times and plenty of time together to make memories, talk and miss my mother.
When COVID slammed the door shut, I called him, and my family visited outside his window trying to bring cheer and distraction. My cousin and her husband were living in the independent living section of this same senior complex, and she was a lifeline, visiting him ‘from the inside’ on a daily basis and watching Jeopardy with him. The nagging ache in my side continued and I was so tired. Who wasn’t tired? Tired of seeing my dad only through a window. Tired from the pivot of leading an organization from zoom and building a continuing medical education enterprise that took place entirely online. I grew tired of the Hollywood Squares style faces on my computer for hours and days on end. And the masks! Online grocery shopping. Even when the pain finally forced a call to my primary care doctor, we met online.
I was 63. Prime time for a gall stone, we both surmised. A tad fearful, I reported in for an ultrasound scan and labs on a Monday afternoon. I was concerned with exposure. It was the first time I had really been out ‘in public’ for a long while. By dinnertime on Monday, the doctor called with the results. The ultrasound looked good, no gallstone. But there were some blood lab anomalies. Would I please go to the local emergency department for a new set of blood labs. Tonight, not tomorrow. My doctor would fax over the order. What on earth?
Clueless, I complied. IV in the left arm, thanks to a paramedic named Steve. Six tubes collected and an IV in the right arm. A set of blood cultures had to be drawn from a different site. One more set of tubes from the left. The nurse said kindly, “Would you like to have someone with you?” She also said I would not be dismissed from the emergency department until I had a hematology consult. That might not happen until the next day.
I had spent 20 years working with the American College of Emergency Physicians. Because of all of that continuing medical education, in person and online, I had absorbed enough to raise an eyebrow and ask if I needed an oncologist. With an affirmative response I asked to be transferred to the James Cancer Center at The Ohio State University. By 11:00 pm on this very same Monday, I was admitted to the leukemia floor at the James. The Leukemia floor? COVID on the outside. Technically, under COVID protocols, no visitors were allowed in the hospital, but my husband accompanied me to the James. The admitting nurse on the floor told him to sneak out before 6 AM. I would soon be alone. My room on the 14th floor looked out at the ‘Shoe,’ the Ohio State University Buckeyes football stadium. The OSU signage at the stadium lit the night as I stood in my room.
My father played football there in college as part of the 1954 National Championship Team under Coach Woody Hayes. Growing up, I spent many Saturdays at the stadium. Now my father was in assisted living 14 miles away and I was reminiscing on our shared history with this stadium. I had often heard people say it was terrible for a parent to lose a child. All I could think was that I needed to survive so that I could continue to care for him. I could not be the one to go first. I prayed not only upward but towards the illuminated Block O, as symbolic of holy ground as a Buckeye could get.
I was 63 and I had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.
Today, I am celebrating four and a half years as a transplant survivor. I wear a bracelet that says “Happy to be Here.” I am grateful that I survived to spend time daily with my father during the last two years of his life before he passed in December 2023. I was there to hold his hand.
I am beginning a free Substack and invite anyone interested in my story to follow along.