A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung

Author:Nicole Chung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

13

I was reading congratulatory texts from friends and hadn’t even made it out of bed when my mother called me on my publication day. She had seen her doctor the day before to discuss some mysterious spotting. A scan had revealed a strange mass in her abdomen, and now her doctor was referring her to a surgeon to have it removed and sent for testing. Mom was already convinced of the worst.

“What if it’s cancer?” she said, her voice low and choked with fear.

We had buried Dad nine months earlier. I would not allow myself to imagine anything happening to her. “You had a hysterectomy twenty years ago,” I said, as if she needed to be reminded. “You don’t have any organs there where cancer could develop. It’s got to be benign.”

Over the next few weeks, my book tour took me all over the country: Seattle, Austin, Boston, New York. I would stop at home long enough to reconnect with my family, unpack, and have my event clothes dry-cleaned, then take off with another suitcase stuffed with dresses and jumpsuits. No matter where I was, my mother always knew the forecast. “You’re supposed to be having beautiful fall weather in Boston,” she’d say when I called; or, “Did you arrive before or after the big storm in Chicago?” I realized that she was tracking my travels in weather systems as a way of looking after me.

I was able to stop in Oregon to see her before her surgery. A bookstore one town over offered to host me for a reading; she drove us there and sat in the front row. My high school guidance counselor was in attendance, as were my beloved second-grade teacher and a friend who’d made her husband drive ninety minutes so she could be there. When an audience member asked me if my adoptive parents were “offended” by anything I’d written, Mom sat up a bit straighter in her chair and said loudly, “No.” After I finished my talk, she asked one of the booksellers if she could have the promotional poster they’d placed in the window.

“A real mom power move,” I said with a laugh.

“Well, it’s a nice picture of you!” she said. “I’m very proud of you, hon. Your dad is, too.”

Her surgeon was optimistic following the outpatient procedure, reporting that the tumor wasn’t large and that she had gotten everything she could see and taken margins for further testing. A few days later I was at a book festival, about to head to my first event of the day, when Mom texted me with the results: stage 2 cancer. Ovarian, endometrial, it’s hard to know exactly what to call it. She sounded exhausted and overwhelmed when I reached her on the phone, much as she had in the last years of my dad’s life, and I hated hearing those familiar notes in her voice. She said that I should talk to her surgeon to get all the details, and gave me her number.

I

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