The Earring

Book 6 Part 8

After weeks of Ben Gay and back rubs, David agreed that he needed to take more drastic action. He had a friend whose wife was a Chiropractor. He went to see her. She suggested a masseuse. The first massage seemed to help, but after a week, the pain was back. He went for weekly massages for a month. Still, the pain kept recurring. Finally, he agreed to see a doctor.

The doctor prescribed muscle relaxants. When those didn't help, he ran a series of tests. David didn't have any kidney or bladder problems. The doctor told David not to lift anything or do anything strenuous and to schedule another appointment if his back didn't get better on its own. The pain receded, or at least that's what David told me.

That August we rented a condo on the beach and took a month's vacation. David told me that he had job fatigue and needed some time away to recoup. Faith was with us the whole time. Josh and Zach came for a couple of weeks. We lounged on the beach, took long moonlit walks, and did a lot of reading. One day we played putt putt golf. I noticed that David did not bend and contort his body the way he usually did when studying the green for the most advantageous angle.

"What's the matter, Hon?" I asked. "Is your back bothering you again?"

"I pulled it yesterday playing beach volleyball with the boys," he said. "It's nothing."

When he got back to work, he got a massage pillow for his chair.

"I'm starting to get stiff from sitting so much at a computer," he told me.

He had bought a motorcycle a couple of years after he started working at the prison. I called it his male menopause extravagance. He had been riding it to work, to conserve gas, he said. That fall, I noticed that when he got off his bike, he would always massage his back for a minute. In November, he started taking his truck again.

"You getting too old for the bike?" I teased.

"Naw," he said, "but I don't much care for the cold."

"Cold?" I said. "This has been the most unseasonably warm winter since we got back to Louisiana."

"Yeah, but when we had that cold snap last week it sort of settled in my back. I'm going to give the bike a rest."

I started watching David closely, but once he stopped riding the bike, I didn't see any more signs of pain. In March, though, he started hurting again.

"I've made you another appointment with the doctor," I told him. "This has gone on too long."

The doctor gave him some more muscle relaxants. I was frustrated. Zach had finished nursing school. I asked him what he thought. He suggested some exercises that were good for people who sat too much.

On April the first, David called me from work. He told me that he was bloated and his back was killing him. He wanted me to come get him. I thought he was playing an April Fools' joke. The social worker, who had an office next to him, took the phone. "This is no joke, Syd," she said. "He needs to see a doctor."

I didn't take him to see his doctor. I took him to the emergency room. They put him in the hospital to run a battery of tests. The diagnosis was stage-4 pancreatic cancer. We were told he had six months or less to live.

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Faith put the book down. It wasn't that late, but she knew that whatever Mama wrote about Daddy's illness would be heart wrenching. She didn't want to cry herself to sleep. She went into the living room. Teresa was reading Mama's journal.