http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/HopeHouse.mp3
It’s amazing how hard times can bring a family together and each year at Thanksgiving, it’s been our tradition at IPR to share an extraordinary story of family. Find past stories here.
This year we feature the story of a soft-spoken, hard-working “super mom” from Charlevoix, Hope House. Last June she suddenly found herself in brain surgery.
Early Warning Signs Of Trouble
Hope and her husband Casey now trace her first symptoms back to this time last year. As they will again this year, the family celebrated Thanksgiving with Hope’s side of the family. For Hope, and other women of her family, the big event comes after turkey, on Friday morning.
“That was always like Hope’s Super Bowl, is going to do the crazy get up early and go shopping on the day after Thanksgiving,” Casey says.
“We stayed up all night last year because all the stores opened, like they’re doing this year too,” Hope adds.
But it was odd last year. Hope went shopping. She was up all night, as she said. But the ambition to shop was curiously absent. She says she could have taken it or left it. It seemed strange then, but not something to worry about.
But by spring, Hope was feeling so lazy and so very much not herself she asked her doctor is she might be depressed.
Brain Cancer
Hope was not depressed. Her lack of motivation and initiative could be traced to a tumor in her frontal brain lobe about the size of a fist. After an MRI revealed the tumor, life was a whirlwind. Doctors acted fast. She took leave from work May 29th and by June 7th she was in brain surgery in Cleveland. At the time she was 37 years old.
All that was scary for 12-year-old Lauren, but fear really struck when her mom was lying in the hospital confused. The family walked in and caught Hope talking on the phone when there was no one on the other line.
“Yeah, it was scary,” says Lauren, who also says it was actually reassuring to be by mom’s side in Cleveland after surgery. “Just seeing her progress from the sickly woman in the bed to the lively, active – my mom – it was pretty cool.”
A Long, Frustrating Recovery
Actually the recovery has been slow. The Charlevoix community and St. Mary church and school members chipped in with months of meals over the summer, as Hope recovered. Even now, nearly six months after surgery, Hope still is not that same lively, active mom Lauren knew before cancer.
Hope is cancer free, though. She never lost her hair and she looks good healthy.
“Everyone says that – you look so good,” she says. “Thanks. But my mind is all screwed up…and I think people at church and at school think, ‘Wow, you look great. Why aren’t you working?’
“It’s just hard.”
Hope is a nurse. Worried she could make a costly mistake, her doctors have not cleared her to return to the job. She’s been out so long she was recently asked to clean out her desk.
She complains to her cognitive therapist about the slow progress.
“She’s really good about telling me, ‘You had your brain cut in two, so what do you expect?’ ‘I know,’” Hope laughs quietly.
Hope also on a pill form of chemotherapy, a regimen she takes from home. She needs a lot of rest and until last month she was on an anti-seizure medication that also left her feeling irritable.
Missing “Super Mom”
“Hope was, you know, this amazing super woman who could juggle a thousand balls in the air at one time and getting the kids where they had to get to and just managing our lives,” Casey says the whole family has had to chip in and help as mom recovers.
“And maybe we took for granted some of the things she was doing before. But it was amazing to see how much she was doing to keep out lives all rolling smoothly,” he says.
In many ways, life is normal for nine-year-old Joshua, who as usual, rummages through the fridge almost immediately after dinner, plays with his Legos and keeps up with soccer. But Joshua has also had more behavior problems this year.
“We feel scared and we just want to get our feelings out, but anger feelings, so we take out on other people sometimes,” Joshua says. “But we shouldn’t do that. So we’re working on that.”
Coming To Grips With Fear & Anger
He’s had some help processing through his feelings about his mom’s illness. Lauren and Joshua participated in a six-week program this fall. Called CLIMB, it’s designed specifically to help children who have cancer in the family to wrestle through their complex emotions. It’s run by the hospital in Petoskey, McLaren-Northern Michigan.
In many ways, Lauren and Joshua’s worlds have changed this year. It’s not just mom’s illness. Dad has been scared too, for example, and sometimes he’s been a bit shorter with the kids.
Enormous medical bills show up on the kitchen table. Hope and Casey worry about what will be covered by insurance. They sometimes fight. Now even Joshua has started to worry about money.
“We’ve been having to spend lots of money on, like, bills, driving down to Cleveland and how much the medicine costs and it was nice to find out that this program was free for us,” he says of the CLIMB program. “It’s been so good for a free thing.”
Each week for six weeks the kids talked about how to cope with another emotion with Social Worker Amy Juneau. For anger, week five, they learned breathing techniques for calming and they talked about good ways to deal with anger.
So, for Joshua, Legos are no longer simply fun, but an outlet for his emotions when fear and anger get the best of him. The same is true with soccer, or playing with the dog. In Lauren’s case, her horse riding, or music, prayer and journaling all help.
Coping Together
Lauren and Joshua say the program is fun, but they need these skills. Mom is cancer free, but the fear returns every few months when their parents return to Cleveland for more testing. Hope has been told her form of cancer could easily come back.
And Hope says these classes have been good for mom and dad too, helping them to talk with their kids and helping the family to cope together.
“I was feeling lost, really,” she says. “Because I was trying to deal with it. He (Casey) was trying to deal with it. And we’re trying to help them deal with it. And it’s hard because you don’t really know what to say. And they’re scared and not real talkative sometimes.”
Six months after that original diagnosis and a year from the day they trace back to those first symptoms, fear remains palpable. But family members also feel closer to each other these days, closer to God, they say, and grateful to the community of Charlevoix for months of support.
And as for Hope’s big shopping day Friday, she worries her mind will be quickly overwhelmed. But she’s looking forward to it. And that’s welcome improvement.