My Sister with Nine Lives

This sister

My sister has nine lives. I’m pretty sure she just completed her eighth.  Rhoda is the funny one, the one who makes us laugh and who doesn’t take life too seriously. When we were kids, she wanted to play outside the box, Every Single Time.

When we six sisters played church with dolls, her children were the worst behaved. In our play in the playhouse, she was not happy pretending to be a happy family. No, we had to have squabbles, broken families, and belligerent children. We couldn’t have a hospital with normal patients. We had to have an “insane asylum” where we strapped our patients down and gave them “injections” to make them quit fighting. When we played with people cutouts (our version of paper dolls) from Sears and Roebuck catalogs, we imitated other children who had issues because it was more fun than being “normal” people. I realize now, decades later, that this playing gave us an outlet for our frustrations.

The other five of us were content with mimicking our current life for the most part, but not Rhoda. So much so that, one day when we were deciding what to play, Alice replied to Rhoda’s insistence of another traumatic lifestyle, “Why can’t we just play and be “normal” people for once?!”

The many faces of Rhoda

Rhoda worked as an OR supervisor in her local hospital for over 40 years.  Folks say she was the best and ordered doctors around when necessary. They say she ran a tight ship in the Operating Room. None of us can figure out how that could be true because her ship at home was never tight. It still isn’t.

Once she gave her hubby her CPAP machine because she wasn’t using it and his wasn’t working. He ended up in the hospital. Rhoda admitted she’d told Ralph to use her machine and the doctor – a former coworker – lost it. “You almost killed your husband,” he told her.  He couldn’t believe what she’d done because, in the hospital, this never would have happened under her watch. Obviously, he doesn’t know our Rhoda.

Rhoda and Ralph had one biological child and, when no more children arrived, they became foster parents. They ended up adopting two sets of siblings for a total of five. She and I both have six children. Our kids grew up playing together; some of them spent weeks at my home during summer breaks. At my house, we had rules that we followed, even for visiting cousins. My kids attest to the fact that Aunt Rhoda’s house was their favorite place to go. I’m not sure it was a true compliment because the reason they liked it so much was there was no curfew, no limits on junk food and movies, and free reign of the swimming pool.

A nurse as a patient

“Nurses make the worst patients”, they say. When others attempt to medicate themselves, Rhoda yells at them. However, she does it to herself all the time and doesn’t think we should be upset. She does things she knows she shouldn’t do – things she’d be appalled if one of her sisters did – and thinks it doesn’t matter. She always comes out of it, and we’re left shaking our heads.

Last fall she completed another mammogram and was dismayed to learn they “found something.”  This time, she listened to us. She had a biopsy. It was cancer. Fortunately for her, it was so small and the margins so good that she did not need chemo or radiation. It’s probably a good thing, because she would have found ways to avoid those appointments if she could.

Barring the fact that two of her sisters are undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, she is the least healthy of us all. Likely, that is the result of a life of doing what she wanted, when she wanted.

Once when sitting with her on her deck, I asked why she was so short of breath. “Oh, I just finished unloading the camper by myself,” she said, waving her hand at my concern. “Stop worrying. I’m fine.”  I believed her. I should have worried instead. 

Less than 24 hours later, she was in the ER with an infection. This infection was so bad that it had damaged her heart valve. I was kicking myself for allowing her to convince me she was okay.  A visit to the dentist several weeks prior probably dislodged bacteria into her bloodstream. For weeks, she kept waking up with night sweats and ignored them. Had any of us had those symptoms, she would have been calling the rescue squad to take us for medical attention.

But not Rhoda. She’d be okay, she thought. Surely, it was just the flu. She kept showing up to work and none of her coworkers were the wiser.  When she ended up in the hospital, we thought her time was over.  Another sister spent the night watching Rhoda gasp for breath until sunrise finally came. Doctors were afraid to put her under anesthesia to give her an artificial valve. She limped along with regular checkups that, fortunately, she decided to keep. The time came when there was no other option other than replacing her heart valve. We knew she might not survive this procedure, but she did. That new valve has given her a new lease on life.

Her eighth life.

We don’t know how she does it.  It seems she keeps getting new lives.

A few weekends ago, Rhoda went to a walk-in clinic which sent her to the ER at the hospital where she’d worked. That hospital transferred her to the larger hospital where she has had all her serious surgical procedures in the past. We were concerned that she might not make it this time.

An internal bleed that could not be located, blood pressure that (even with medication) hovered below normal range, and a UTI that screamed trouble were the culprits. Until her admission, she had diagnosed her discomfort as the result of a pulled muscle in her groin and was taking a narcotic she still had on hand for the pain. Had any of the rest of us told her we were experiencing pain that severe, she’d have insisted we head to the ER. But for her, it’s always different.

Added to the fact that her pulmonary hypertension became worse and the dance between blood too thick and too thin was constant as doctors tried to protect her heart valve, her diabetes threatened to blow off the charts. She was critically ill! CT scans with contrast would be necessary to find the bleed, but the contrast had potential to kill her kidneys because of her condition.

After three units of blood five days apart, enhanced oxygen with medication to help her pulmonary hypertension, and an CAT scan, the “bleed” seemed to stop on its own. Once again, God mercifully intervened and she is home again and doing better. “I really thought I was at the end of my nine lives,” she told me from her hospital room.

Thankful for all those lives

I don’t know how she continues to do it. She keeps getting new lives. As my son so aptly said following the many texts about Aunt Rhoda through that long weekend, “Aunt Rhoda will probably outlive us all.”

 

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Photo credit: parentingupstream from pixabay.com

Yes, I have permission from my sister Rhoda to share this post.