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A Mother's Touch
Kathy Staub felt her heartbeat quicken and the familiar sweat coat her forehead. The 42-year-old deli clerk from Philadelphia dreaded the moment each day when she had to give her youngest son, Michael, an injection of an immune-boosting drug called Neupogen. She had to get the long needle into his arm at a 90-degree angle and hit the layer of fat between the skin and muscle. This required a quick and focused stab. It was June 2001, and just the thought of causing any more pain to 20-year-old Michael, a college sophomore diagnosed a few months earlier with a rare form of leukemia, made her anxious. He'd tolerated two rounds of chemo, the central line catheters and bone marrow biopsies. But injections were the one thing he really hated. "C'mon, I don't like this. Do it fast, do it fast," Michael pleaded, standing in the family's living room. Kathy squeezed his biceps to try to tighten his skin and lessen the pricking and burning sensation. Then she positioned the thumb of her other hand on the plunger of the syringe. Just do it, she told herself. Focus. Focus.Quickly she jabbed the shot into Michael's arm and, through his squirming, withdrew the plunger slightly to make sure there was no blood. Bull's-eye. She depressed the plunger fully and pulled out the shot. Then Michael adjusted the IV line attached to his chest and plopped back down on the teal blue sectional to watch TV.
Kathy could have hired a nurse for Michael while he was home between treatments at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. But she wanted to be the one to clean out his catheter and give him his daily shots, IV fluids and pills. Never mind that she was squeamish at the sight of a mere drop of blood.
Kathy was close to her two other children, Melissa, 23, living at home, and Matthew Jr., 22, away at college, but she and Michael had a special bond. Kathy practically lived at the hospital when he was there for treatments. She -- and the whole family, including her husband, Matthew, a grocery store meat manager -- had grown extremely close to all of Michael's nurses on Rhoads 7, the floor where leukemia and lymphoma patients are treated. And not just because of the great care they gave Michael. The nurses became a support system, especially for Kathy. She ate with them, shared her fears and cried on their shoulders. They would tell her, "Michael is strong. He'll beat this," and offer back rubs when she had trouble catching a nap in the reclining chair in his room.
Kathy's appreciation of them grew when she began to understand what their jobs entailed. One of the first times Kathy gave Michael his daily shot of blood thinner, she missed and hit her own hand. It bled for hours because the anticlotting drug had seeped into her system. She kept track of all of Michael's shots and his 50 daily pills in a notebook she'd placed in the dining room, next to his old dorm fridge. It now contained IV bags of magnesium and potassium, to replenish his electrolytes, and amphotericin, an antibiotic for the fungal pneumonia he'd caught because of his weakened immune system.
"I always thought nurses just gave you the pills and walked out of the room," Kathy says. "Now I had a whole new understanding of how they manage their time and energy. And they had three or four patients. It took me all day just to manage one. But I didn't really feel like a nurse. I was just Mom."
Michael took a turn for the worse in August 2001 and was admitted back on Rhoads 7 for a third round of chemo. Kathy quit her job so she could remain at the hospital, slipping home for only an hour a day to shower when Matthew came by the hospital after work. "I never really slept, because Michael would vomit all during the night and the diarrhea was constant," Kathy says. "I would just throw away bagfuls of clothes."
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