Chapter 16 sickness

Since I received a Victorian education since I was a child, my mother didn't like to complain about her illness to others, and she didn't want to let the children know that she was sick, so Luca and I knew nothing about my mother's illness, but Robert always Being with his mother, he knows it all too well.They have asked many experts to check in Switzerland, but the results are different every time. In October 1992, my mother was invited to go to Los Angeles to participate in the shooting of a documentary.Mother decided to take this opportunity to undergo a thorough examination in the United States.

When I saw my mother at LAX, she looked very tired and nervous.For many years, my mother only flew economy class, and for a while, she and Robert would buy business class tickets for each other as gifts, go on vacation together or work for UNICEF.This was her first time to fly first class, and it was because of physical discomfort and Robert's strong request. My mother thought it was a crime to fly first class at a time when so many people in the world were starving.Similarly, my mother thinks that a car is just a means of transportation, as long as it is safe and fast.Therefore, our family does not own luxury sports cars such as Ferraris like many star families. There are only Volvos and Audis in the garage, and my mother trusts them.

It was odd to me that my mother hardly drove herself, and although not every woman in Rome in the 1970s could drive, I couldn't resist asking her that question.As far as I can remember, my father gave her a Thunderbird sports car as soon as my mother got her driver's license.But one day my mother drove home from the studio after filming, and a woman drove into her from behind. Although it was obvious that the woman should be fully responsible, she was quite unreasonable and pushed all responsibility away. to the mother's head. When the mother came home and told the father about it, the father was very angry.However, things didn't stop there.The woman decided to sue her mother after learning her mother's identity, and her intentions couldn't be more obvious: to become a celebrity herself by going to court with a celebrity.After this incident, my mother decided to sell the sports car.The fear of car accidents and the disappointment and anger caused by the despicableness of human nature made my mother no longer drive by herself.When talking about this matter later, my mother said: A good driver needs to have some aggressive traits in her character, but she doesn't have it, and she never intends to have it, so she can't be a good driver, so she gave up thought of driving.From today's point of view, my mother may be a bit extreme, but in Rome or Paris at that time, driving was indeed like this, and a trip was a small-scale war.

In 1992, my mother entered her fifth year of work at UNICEF. The workload increased a lot and the schedule became more and more tight.Since all the air tickets are provided by the foundation, and most of the destinations are in developing countries, there are no direct flights, so the mother and Robert had to transfer several times during the flight.Although Robert is optimistic that this method of dividing a long-distance flight into several short-distance flights can relieve fatigue and reduce the problem of jet lag, this method has lengthened the entire flight a lot, and consumes a lot of time and energy. .In most cases, they have just returned from developing countries and will soon go to some developed countries to do publicity and reporting.There, my mother will accept some interviews, tell people about the tragic scenes she saw in those war-torn or famine-ridden areas, and participate in some fund-raising activities for UNICEF.The two of them make up almost a year of these two activities, with a few weeks in between to let them get used to the jet lag and get back on the road for the next leg of their journey.

Such tiring work is very harmful to the mother's body, but she still enjoys it.Every time she came back, she would tell us about the misfortunes of the children she had seen.In her eyes, what we see is disappointment and compassion, and she is puzzled by the behavior of the governments of those countries in treating children.Someone once asked her that many misfortunes were actually caused by the perennial fighting between the local government and the armed opposition, and it is impossible to solve these political problems by relying on UNICEF. To spare no effort to run for it?Mother always had only one answer when faced with similar questions: "It's like sitting in your living room and suddenly hearing a horrible scream from the street, followed by a car crashing violently, your heart seems to be shocked. When you jump out of your chair and run out into the street to find a child hit by a car and lying in a pool of blood, you don’t stop to think who was at fault, the driver’s car was driving too fast. Quick, the child suddenly ran into the road and chased his ball. What you should do at this time is to pick up the child and send him to the hospital quickly."

After my mother came back from Somalia, we talked on the phone every week, and each time we talked for a long time.It was then that I felt the heaviness in her voice for the first time in my life.She told me she just came back from hell.I wanted her to go into more detail, but my mother didn't want to talk too much on the phone, and she said she would tell me more when we got to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, my mother told me about her depression.On the faces of millions of Somali children, she could not see any visions and fantasies about the future, only their desire for food.The biggest problem with Somalia is that the country has almost no infrastructure.Some other countries also have unfortunate children, such as Vietnam, but at least they still have the ability to dream of tomorrow, because there are hospitals, schools, and roads there, as long as they are repaired, they can be useful, but the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu, No hospitals, no schools, no roads, almost nothing there.

My mother always said that peace should also be a subject that we should study hard. "We often study war, and there is even a special subject in the university that teaches war knowledge. It would be a wonderful thing if there was a place that could teach us how to create and maintain peace-a university that teaches peace. .” Every Christmas, when we got together as a family, my mother would tell those stories about her travels, about the kids, about the interviews, about her nervousness when she spoke to Congress. "Those parliamentarians are very good people," said my mother. "It's not easy to solve the Ethiopian problem because it involves a lot of political factors, not just coffee or coconuts, but what makes me happy is , after I went to Congress to speak, the U.S. government increased economic aid to Ethiopia."

The mother never takes the credit for these things on her own. Usually, Robert can't help but add after the mother has finished speaking, enriching the whole picture. "She just stood in front of the members of Congress and expressed her views. Then the US government provided an additional 60 million US dollars in aid." Every time we hear them talk about these things, we feel very proud.However, when the post-dinner conversation is over and everyone begins to reflect on the past year, we find that the mother has devoted another full year to this extra work.We can all see her fatigue and haggardness, and we will always ask her tentatively: "When will you go on vacation with Robert?" In fact, we all know that we can't persuade her to stop, we just hope that she can be in the tense work gap , take time to enjoy the fun of life.Yet even such a small wish was not fulfilled.

Doctors in Los Angeles conducted a comprehensive examination on the mother, but they could not come up with definite results. The doctor suggested that a laparoscopy should be used at this time. On November 1, 1992, my mother underwent laparoscopy at Mount Sinai Hospital. Two hours later, the doctor came to the waiting room and told us that they had found cancer cells in my mother's abdominal cavity, and the cancer cells had begun to spread. They speculate that cancer cells may first grow near the appendix.No one can tell for sure, because the appendix cannot be directly seen with a laparoscope, it hides in the corner of the abdominal cavity, we know very little about this useless organ that has degenerated in the human body, but it killed my Mother.In the small organ of the appendix, is there accumulated food that our bodies cannot digest, or accumulated wounds that our souls cannot repair?

The doctor estimated that the mother had already suffered from cancer about five years ago, but the cancer cells multiplied very slowly in the mother's body, and the tumor was not large when it was discovered.The cause of the abdominal pain my mother often experienced was that the cancerous tumor was pressing on her ileum, putting too much pressure on the nutrient-absorbing organ to work properly and not being able to pass food through, causing spasms.Doctors removed part of the mother's ileum, hoping it would ease her pain. These overly technical medical terms meant nothing to us, and we went to visit her together in the special ward after the operation.We didn't tell her the truth about her condition, but the sensitive mother seemed to have noticed something. She knew that this time she was seriously ill, even more dangerous than the time she was bitten by an unknown bug in Somalia.At that time, my mother was suspected of being infected with a terrible local infectious disease. The doctor used a very powerful antibiotic to help her out of danger. Even so, my mother suffered a lot. After she came back, she Said to me once, let me promise not to take that antibiotic on anyone's persuasion anyway.

After years of fighting for thousands of starving children, a mother found herself unable to eat.In order to cure her cancer, the doctor asked her not to absorb nutrients through the digestive tract at all, that is to say, the mother will inject a yellow nutrient solution intravenously to maintain the energy needed every day. My mother once described to us the children who waited for UNICEF assistance in the refugee camp. In their eyes, a bowl of polenta was very precious.We have also seen the photos brought back by mothers from Africa. Those children who were on the verge of death could not even eat directly because of severe dehydration, and could only temporarily maintain their lives through intravenous drips.Now the mother is one of them. We had to wait for my mother to heal from the surgery before we could arrange for her to undergo chemotherapy.Our whole family arranged a schedule and took turns going to the hospital to accompany her.I usually visit her in the morning, then go back to my office, get the most urgent things done first, and then start browsing all kinds of information about cancer treatment, calling every cancer rehab center, learning about the latest research Information and the most scientific methods of treatment, hours at a time.Unfortunately, I soon had to face an unacceptable fact that the most commonly used chemotherapy in cancer treatment has basically not changed since the 1960s, that is to say, for 30 years Little progress has been made in the fight against cancer. The 60s sounded almost as distant as the Middle Ages.