Jacob

I’m taking a time out from writing in my second novel and my blog to write about someone much more important than both those things.  Someone much more important than most things in my life. My brother, Jacob Jonathan.

Words simply cannot do him justice, at all.  Has he driven me crazy most of my life? Yes. Have I driven him crazy? Yes. Will I be devastated anyways when he passes away? Absolutely.  I would rather have him pissing me off and driving me crazy for many more years to come, than to lose him to cancer.  The big C word, right?

He was only three years old when this horrible journey began for him.  My mother had just given birth to me when she noticed her first born, Jake, was getting sick. I recall her (vaguely) telling me that his head enlarged, at least noticeably, he wouldn’t eat, he had a fever, he was tired all the time, and it got to the point where he would scream if you put him in the bath, likely because that is how much he was burning up, but I can’t be sure. After being written off as a paranoid mother, a doctor finally found the brain tumor.  Medullablastoma.  All the symptoms he exhibited where textbook for this particular brain tumor.

He wasn’t expected to live past the surgery and radiation treatments, let alone live to the age of 41. At 41, they found a “cyst” on his back. A cyst that opened the flood gates for worse and worse news over the next year. We realized very quickly, this wasn’t a cyst but instead a soft tissue cancer called, myxofibrosarcoma. An aggressive cancer that is typical in patients who had undergone radiation at least twenty years prior.

The irony. The thing that saved him almost 40 years ago is going to kill him now. After surgery and radiation at the original site, it wasn’t long before they discovered it had spread to his butt, his lungs, his leg. Medical insurance jerked him around in January for three weeks after that discovery.  This three weeks gave the cancer time to grow and spread to the untouched lung.

He went through several months of chemotherapy once insurance resumed and he responded very well, at first.  Then the chemo stopped affecting the cancer and it was in his liver and his brain. A heartbroken mother, who for the second time had to endure this nightmare with her child, had to tell her two other children that it wouldn’t be long before they would be burying their older brother.

One sibling, me, at the age of 39 and our little brother who is only 14.  Jake is now 42 and likely won’t see his 43^rd birthday. Every day I feel like puking, crying, screaming, or drinking or all of the above at once. We lost our dad almost eight years ago. It seems like a long time ago, numerically, but not emotionally.  I feel like my entire childhood has vanished before my very eyes. I still have my mother, it’s true, but it feels different.  Maybe it’s because she has a whole family with my step dad.  Jake, my dad, her, and I were once a whole family.  My father is dead, Jake is going to die and my mom has another family, I begin to feel sometimes it’s going to be as if we never existed.  All those memories will fade away and disappear and somehow, so will I.

It is all very selfish. I’m wallowing in self-pity when I should be thinking about him and spending time with him, which I fully intend to do, but I can’t stop what’s coming.  I can’t do anything to help him. I want to save him, but I can’t. He is too young to die.