For as long as I can remember, the centerpiece of my coffee table has been an outdated, 3000 page Harvard medical book. I still see that old thing lying around sometimes. The pages are swollen from being soaked and dried out so much, stained by both pepsi and water. The cover is full of cigarette burns, too, side-effects of my mom's sleeping disorders and eternally-burning Pall Malls.
It used to by my mama's Bible- the words inside were in red and black ink. Each time she had a new symptom, she'd search the book to see what illness to diagnose herself with. Coughing, the flu, chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, discs crumbling away in her back. Red ink, in the book, meant you were having an emergency. For awhile we thought she was a bit loony, a hypochondriac at times, and maybe she should just quit smoking. But everything made sense when we learned that Hepatitis C doesn't go away like they thought it did back in the 70's.
Forty years is a long time to have living things* inside you, living things destroying you, making your immune system weak, making your liver ache. I'm sure these shots will weaken my mother as they did before, making her feel like a skin-made sack of viruses, interferon, and its side-effects; the shots will make her feel "like death," as she always says. Our messy house will depress her, make her long for a beautiful, clean log cabin with shiny wood floors.
When my mom first learned the intensity of her illness - stage 2 out of 4, I still went to church, and she told me to put her on the prayer request list every sunday. That's how I knew Hepatitis C would change our lives. And even though I didn't tell my mom this, I much prefer to place my faith in science, in these shots and potential cures and transplants, instead of the supernatural - an unreliable God who only helps some and "works in mysterious ways" for all the others.
But maybe it's true what they say, that prayer doesn't change God, but the people who pray. Or in this case, the person being prayed for. Even if my mom only believes in a God sometimes, it must help to know that strangers are out in the world requesting that God somehow make things different for her.
I don't know about God or how prayers work anymore, but I still have my faith in science. I know that if anyone can heal the sick, it's the researchers who spend hours and hours in the lab recording the nature of the universe by looking through the lens of a microscope. This is going to be a long year, but I still have hope. My mom still has hope, too, and so do the researchers who are wondering how well this treatment will work.
Thankfully, I feel she's in good hands, and I take comfort in remembering that even when she feels like death, possibly even like dying, there will be "something bright burning, still burning" behind all the interferon and cirrhosis. There will be my mother and her strong, resilient spirit burning. And more than likely, she will not be without her her eternally-burning cigarettes.
*Though some say they aren't living, that viruses straddle the definition of life.
