I got my cancer diagnosis within hours of my PET scan,

which was a day filled with unexpected surprise.

It was just past dawn and I’d had a restless night in the motel room, finishing my 24 hours fast before the scan. I’d been told I might have lung cancer three months earlier and my efforts to quell my anxiousness were losing strength.

This was finally it. The day had arrived. I would finally know if I had lung cancer.

On this morning, so carefully planned to be stress free, my phone rang shortly after dawn, as I was dressing in the motel room, preparing to leave for my morning PET scan.

My daughter had gone off on a weekend vacation to the coast with the kids and he had taken the opportunity to peak into her front door and he was angry at the the shape it was in. He wanted a remedy and he wanted it right then and there. My daughter lived half a block down from him, in a house my mother bought for her. He knew for years her home was becoming increasingly out of order and waited until this critical day to make it an issue, because he needed to find work for his work crew. He wanted to bring these strangers into her home while they were away and put everything in the trash. I begged him not to and the more he insisted the more my begging turned into anger.

He didn’t know that just two days earlier, my grandchildren both took me by the hand and walked me into their home while their mother was away. She asked me to never look inside her house and I respected that request until my grandchildren came over and insisted that I go with them. They asked me to help them get their home cleaned. I was not going to say no to that so I decided I would clean their home that weekend, while the kids and my daughter were gone, and after my PET scan. It was on the agenda. I had not explained that to this obnoxious boneheaded narcissistic brother-in-law of mine, and had difficulty doing so that morning over the phone, while trying to stay calm and listen to him bellow, I was insistent that he NOT bring his team of workers into their home while they were away and throw everything in the trash. I don’t remember how the call ended or who ended it, only that the end of our exchange was heated. I could thank my sister for that phone call. She is the one who handed the phone to him.

Waiting for the PET scan, I scrunched up in a big soft chair, covered in a pile of warm blankets, instructed to stay calm and relaxed for the best PET scan results. There was no relaxing. As they rolled me in and out of a tube, tears streamed down my face. There was no peace in my heart. All my best efforts to get the best out of this test were shattered in an instant by a selfish little sister who is one of the best enablers of a scumbag that one can ever have come across. The radiologist tried to console me, thinking I was crying about the cancer. I smiled, but didn’t try to explain.

In the meantime he pulled my grand kids’ worm farm out into the hot sun and sprayed it with some kind of cleaner. We’d just assembled it a few weeks earlier, after waiting for weeks for the arrival of our 1000 worms. The farm was working well, up on their shaded porch, teaming with life when they left for the coast. They came home to a plastic container, covered with a dried up chemical and dried up dead worms all over the outside of it, never making it to the ground in their desperate efforts to escape the heat of the baking plastic container, only to be fried in the sizzling chemicals dripping down the sides. It was a tragic end to a happy project I had going with the kids, in one of my rare opportunities to do so.

I now had surgery to prepare for and it took me 3 days to get that house cleaned from end to end, with countless bags of trash that I hauled to the trash on my sweaty back that I knew they would soon be cutting into. Hauling trash in the hot sun on my sweaty back for three days, having just learned I had lung cancer and must soon have surgery and also, that my sister and her daughter had just cut my son and I out of their lives forever. Not that we were ever really in it, except in times of crisis.

As my daughter was driving home, she called when they were minutes from the house that I’d just finished cleaning. We are talking piles of trash knee deep in all four rooms, a pile of dried up dog feces in the middle of my grandson’s room, stuck to a sock and a toy and the rug. The kids told me it had been there for years. It took quite a while to remove.

But the kitchen was the worst. Apples all over wooden counters, so rotten that the bottom halves were liquefied and sinking into the nice, deep wooden shelves. Whole cartons of rotten eggs sitting out on counters. Broken eggs, dried hard, left laying for weeks or more. I cleaned every room, except for hers, from end to end and was just finishing up when her phone call came in. At the end of my gruesome story of the family fight, my daughter said. “I’m so glad, Mom. I’ve always wanted it to be you and me against the family.” This is her theme, I finally realize. She seems to feel the need to team up with someone against everyone else. But I responded impulsively with a big, loud “No, Jane! I don’t want to be at war with the family.” I had no reason to begrudge the family, on her behalf . They had been more than generous with her and I was disturbed, as usual, by the seeming ungratefulness.

She hung up on me and minutes later they pulled up to the house, just as I was walking out their front door. My daughter walked right past me, after just learning that I had cancer, and knowing I’d just spent 3 days hauling her trash in the hot sun on my sweaty back, with her nose in the air and refused to speak to me, angry that I didn’t want to join forces with her against ‘the family’ in the perpetual war.

At the end of this gruesome tale, I walked away brow beaten by the entire clan, who failed to see I was paying dues in other ways, harder to place on a tally, having to listen to all their complaints about my daughter, while it was they who took all my power away, enabling her while I had to watch helplessly as she became increasingly more irresponsible.

This was all within 24 hours of my cancer diagnosis. And ‘the family’ didn’t get any nicer after that.

I’d just weeks earlier learned of a story that rocked my world when it came to my step-brother. There was a time, when my niece was three years old, that I drove 200 miles to rescue my sister who had called me in hysterics, something about her husband getting home late and drunk and she wanted to leave him. The end of the trail on the way to her house was a long, winding, river road, the one my mother would later be killed on. As I was on that river road, and about a mile from the turn to her house, I saw my little sister in her car on the side of the road, with her toddler, her husband in his truck behind her and a police car or two behind his truck. She was leaving him. He followed her and the police put a stop to the chase, thank the powers that be.

My step-brother approached me in tears as my sister and her little girl got into my car. I reassured him that she was not going to leave him, she just needed some time. I reassured him that no one was going to keep him from his daughter. He seemed okay after that. I knew he was a good, devoted father. Or so I thought. I would have reason to question that almost twenty years later, with new information in hand.

This is one of the times that I traveled out of town to rescue my sister and provided a place of refuge for her, nothing I’d find I needed to stand up and read at a funeral. I was disappointed I couldn’t be more of a help for my sister, but at least I was there. She had the support of her step-father, who immediately offered to come and rescue her and her baby, help her move all of her things with a u-haul, something he never offered me during my trials. I wish she would add this to the tally that she famously reads now, at every family funeral.

But on this visit back home with ‘the family’, almost twenty years later, after the crisis on the side of the road, I learn that the evening of his disappearance, he had been pursuing the heart of a country western singer who was traveling through and my brother-in-law was almost arrested for breaking into her trailer and writing on her mirror in lipstick that he loved her and. The police had to come and convince him to go home to his wife. They were friends of his so no arrest was made, but the gossip never died.

I got pretty angry, realizing he was about to leave my sister, way back then, so it seemed to me. And to think that he’d used the same MO on the country western singer that he’d used on my sister a decade ago, the one time she almost had the strength to leave him. But he snagged her back with his suicide message in lipstick on the mirror.

It enraged me, in fact, to think of the times he’d manipulated her to keep her with him. I always believed she deserved so much better. I suppose I was out of bounds on that. But to discover, after all those years, that he was prepared to leave her the minute a prettier face traveled through town, the very damn minute, it made me irate.

I never did share that information with my sister and had been keeping that new information under my hat and so when things blew that night, they really blew.

After my PET scan, and the long drive home, a few hours rest, I am able to log in to the website and see my test results. Positive for lung cancer. I am devastated and call my son ( a stupid thing to do – using him too much for support ). I tell him I’m upset with my sister.

I go upstairs into the parent’s house and have a seat as my step-brother is standing in the middle of the living room, describing the condition of my daughter’s home to my mother and step-father. I have not had the opportunity to tell them of my cancer diagnosis and no one asks me about it. I sit silently as he carries on for a while.

He’d never seen anything so terrible in all his life, he was claiming, although we both knew he’d been watching the growing problem over the years without saying a word. I was shaken to the core at my cancer diagnosis and dismayed that he would choose this time to create a drama about my daughter and my grandchildren, when I was hanging on by a thread and such an uncertain timeline in front of me.

But as he carried on and I sat there silently, my anger grew until I finally asked, “Do you think your life hasn’t been messy?” I asked. “Never as messy as that!” he cried. “Oh no?” I quipped. “When was it ever like that?” he demanded of me.

3 words, 3 words and only three, came out of my mouth that evening. These would be the 3 words that ended my relationship with my sister forever, and shut my step-brother down in an instant. None of them ever did ask about my cancer diagnosis that night or ever again, including my own daughter.

I’d spent my life telling lies at the request of my sister, keeping secrets, even at the expense of my own reputation. (see – A Decade of Lies to Michelle )