This has been a damn tough one to wrap the right words around. I’ve written long essays involving extensive research in far less time. Problem is, this is about the recent death of my wife of 36 years, Carolyn Jane (Sturges) Petersen. Carolyn was my primary source of strength, sanity, heart- and mindfulness in this warped old world, and her disappearance leaves me as a man cut in half. And as we grew older together – she turned 59 on the Winter Solstice and I turn 68 this month – our bond grew ever stronger. Things were so sweet in our lives and love that recently I quipped offhand that “This can’t last.”
And it sure didn’t.
A few weeks ago, with no warning signs we were attuned to detect, Carolyn’s “cured” melanoma of 16 years ago returned and covertly ate her alive from inside out. After weeks of growing discomfort she attributed to stomach trouble, one Sunday C finally relented, and we went to the local hospital emergency room, where she was promptly inserted into a scanning tube. Next morning, an oncologist appeared to tell us that her liver was gone beyond repair, there was also cancer in one lung and possibly her brain; she was terminal. Carolyn, awake but with mellowing morphine at work, seemed unperturbed.
“The dogs,” she looked at me and said, leaving the doctor confused. “This explains everything.”
“Yes,” I acknowledged, “they knew long before we did.” Indeed, Homer and Clara’s increasingly obsessive devotion to Carolyn was but one among many clues we had missed.
“How long, best guess?” I asked the doctor.
“Weeks. A few months, maybe,” the doctor said.
At that point, had I been prescient, I should have taken my wife home to fade and die in familiar surrounds. We had always promised ourselves we wouldn’t die in some cold and steely hospital. But once you fall under the ethereal spell of the medical miasma, hope and desperation make it all but impossible to escape. And so it was we did not argue when the doctors urged that Carolyn be air evacuated immediately to Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, where a couple of the best liver cancer surgeons in the country were said to reside. So off she went. I followed the next day by road.
With that compressed background, we reach my motivation for inflicting this personal tragedy on you: This is an open love letter to Porter Adventist Hospital, both the facility and the people who staff the first-floor oncology unit.
Carolyn’s room at Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango had been tiny, with hardly enough room for one chair and a single small window set back in a recess, so that little natural light was admitted. Although clean and modern, the space was claustrophobic and foreboding. In contrast, her room at Porter was downright spacious, furnished with five chairs and room to dance, had we been up to it. And the Porter room had a full wall of windows through which I watched the sun rise each of the nine mornings I was there, after fitful nights on a cot beside Carolyn’s bed or in the little bed with her. While “bright and cheery” seems an oxymoron for a hospital room, that’s just what it was.
And likewise the medical staff. One would expect working daily with death, as oncology specialists do, would prompt the growth of an emotional exoskeleton. Miraculously, we found that not so at Porter. Carolyn had been awake and typically engaging for the first couple of days, all light and innocence even on morphine. This brief conscious prelude allowed the nursing staff to get a sense of her irresistible lovability and unflinching stoicism. And too, at only 59, Carolyn was a generation younger than most terminal cancer patients, providing another source of “this isn’t fair” empathy. But the exceptional personal compassion we saw in the Porter oncology staff was obviously resident there before we arrived. These were not mere “professional smiles” greeting us at every turn, but the real thing from real people, at times accompanied by real tears. Death-watch nurses, crying! One nurse with a particularly lovely soul visited our room frequently every night she worked and always lingered long. Assuming me to be asleep, she went about her duties, such as checking to make sure the morphine drip was functioning – and far beyond: bathing my comatose wife with a cool damp cloth, turning her gently, applying ointment to eyes and lips, speaking to her quietly and lovingly throughout – and like me, weeping.
And more, including the surgeon we had come there to avail, who was clearly grieved he’d been unable to save my wife – and his assistant in the surgical waiting room who cheerily stayed two hours overtime, no extra pay, to keep me company while I awaited the conclusion of the failed procedure, a volunteer massage therapist, who, like two of the nurses, told me she was dedicating her life to oncology patients after having lost a loved one to cancer. And others, each and all quite special.
On the morning of April 17, Carolyn died gently, having been comatose for several days, her tough little mountain-girl heart unwilling to take a hint. At my request, the palliate care team went to work arranging for me to take Carolyn home to Durango for a dignified cremation (on Good Friday) by the local family-owned mortuary, thus alleviating what had been my greatest fear since arriving there: That my beloved partner would suffer the final indignity of being hauled off to some industrial big-city BBQ, leaving me forever to doubt if the ashes I received were even hers. Thanks to the understanding ladies of Porter’s palliative team, my drive home with Carolyn, seven hours of scenic backroads, over the Divide from Denver to Durango, allowed me to make critical emotional accommodations I doubt I could otherwise have managed. Had it not been for that last road trip together, that sacred private time surrounded always by nature’s healing grandeur, I might not be here today. Compassion had trumped bureaucracy; something we don’t dare expect from a hospital.
We are atheists, Carolyn and me. Yet the personal loving care we received at Porter throughout the most stressful and disorienting week of our lives, was nothing less than a blessing – even as the staff who so exceptionally served and comforted us are angels come down to Earth.
My fondest wish is that you never have to see the inside of an oncology unit, as patient or “survivor.” Yet should it come to that, gives thanks for Porter Adventist Hospital – a Godsend in your midst.
David Petersen is a local author and a 34-year resident of La Plata County.
