The Cool Aunt Conundrum

Cool is easy when you are healthy, the niece is fourteen, and the car is hot.

The last time I woke up from a serious surgery it was for ovarian cancer in 1995. Heidi was there and now Heidi is dead. No, wait, there was another big surgery after that. For ovarian cancer again, six months later. My best friend, Herb, and my mother were there. Now my mother is gone and Herb is in a rehab place on the Hudson recovering from hip surgery, no small thing when you are 85 and have Parkinson’s.

The person who will take me to surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering this week, for the sinus cancer which is bumping up against my brain, is my niece, Caity. You don’t want to appear petrified in front of your niece, you want to be cool; that’s what aunthood is about. You bring the flash: the surprise Broadway tickets, the impractical, exquisite, velvet party shoes, while the parents do the heavy lifting of bringing up the kid.

I was the first person, I think, to put Caity in the driver’s seat of a sports car. The ’94 red Miata convertible, when she was 16, visiting me in a Hudson Valley hamlet, over twenty years ago. Caity was there with her friend Rosie and I gave her the keys, confident that Caity had the maturity to drive sensibly, and waved them off, two long-haired teenage girls, on a back road to Rhinebeck. If there is anything more joyful than two sixteen-year-old girls, giddy with delight, in an adorable red sports car, top down, setting out on life on a summer day in the country, I have not seen it.

I drive a much more solid sports car now, a red Mustang convertible. It spends the cold weather with Caity and her husband and two young children in Connecticut. I don’t use a car in Manhattan; I use a car to get out of Manhattan; once it is too cold to put the top down, I lose interest.

At the end of October, I hand the car off to Caity. May 1^st, I take it back. Normally, this time of year, I’d be thinking of my first spring drive. Usually, it’s the Eileen Fisher outlet in Monroe, forty minutes from the city, then lunch with my college roommate, Sue, fifteen minutes away. Sue died last June from endometrial cancer, undiagnosed until it was too late.

“I’ve been so lucky, I had a great life, I can’t get over what a great life I’ve had,” she kept saying, when I went up with our roommate, Christy, to be with her.

Sue seemed to have no fear of death.

“How did she just accept it?” I ask Christy. “She wasn’t afraid of it. I’m petrified. And I’m scared shitless about this surgery.”

The way this cancer presented, a few months ago, was as a sore in my left nostril which wouldn’t heal. Then there was an occasional strong sawing pain to the left of that, which felt like bone pain and reminded me of the pain I’d had when I’d fractured my wrist. First it was once every few weeks, then it was every 24 or 36 hours, sometimes jolting me out of sleep, so bad that I went rummaging through the medicine cabinet for prescription painkillers from dental work, a few years earlier.

After my biopsy a few weeks ago at NYU-Langone, for what was then still a suspicious mass, I’m given a prescription for Oxycodone and a Narcan rescue kit, which freaks me out.

“I feel like I’m in a crime show,” I tell the nurse.

“It’s the law,” she says. I think she says. I was more or less spinning out with terror at that point and not taking notes. But truly, having a Narcan kit in the house is creepy. It reminds me of the dirt poor, Oxy addicted, Appalachian mountain people in “Demon Copperhead”, though granted, they would not be having surgery with the head of the department at MSK.

I have used Klonopin for years for anxiety. I had been turned on to it at Sloan Kettering in 1995, after I had a pelvic sonogram to diagnose the ovarian cancer and got the tech to point out two tumors, each with its own blood supply.

“I can handle this,” I think.

Surprise, I could not handle it. Hello, Klonopin.

It’s been my go-to drug with what I prefer to call The Latest Excitement, until one afternoon I ask AI if it is safe to take Klonopin at the same time as Oxycodone and screaming red They’re Dropping Bombs On Us Again alarms go off.

WAAA-ZOOOOO!!! WAAA-ZOOOOO!!!

The bottom line, in medical terms, is that Klonopin and Oxy combined can impede your breathing and you pass out and die. That’s why they gave me the Narcan kit. I thought it was silly: I live alone, if I pass out, am I supposed to give myself the Narcan and then call 911?

A doctor at MSK is clearer: If you start feeling woozy, she says, you spray the Narcan in your nose and it dissolves the Oxy. That advice clearly does not allow for someone who takes ten minutes to read the information pamphlet on a new medication before taking it, but okay, I now understand how to use it.

Still, it’s created a conflict: I can treat the pain, which remains sporadic, hitting once a day or never, or I can treat the anxiety, which is constant. I can also use Tylenol with Klonopin, which is not a medical risk – they are old friends, who often play cards together, although Tylenol is nowhere near as powerful as Oxy.

I can also try mental tricks for anxiety. My current favorite is replaying the conversations I’ve recorded with my doctors.

The latest was with the neurosurgeon, who will join the two head and neck surgeons in the O.R..

“The tumor is not in your brain, thankfully, it is not inside your brain,” she says. But these tumors do tend to eat up a little bit of the bone that separates the brain from the nose, she adds, that’s why she will be there, to remove them. “I am your brain protector,” she says.

Even so, I am frightened. Which brings me back to the Cool Aunt problem. My niece is not a kid anymore; she is thirty-nine. She took some time after college, when she was considering med school, to work as a cancer researcher in a lab. In the last few years, she was my Number Two Health Care Proxy after Herb, legally entitled to make decisions on my behalf if I could not. Now, with Herb in rehab, she is number one.

Still, I am the Aunt, longing to be cool. I wish I were not asking her to be in this position, but I am 78. Close friends are gone or have their own health problems. They cannot walk without pain; they are recently out of their own surgeries. It’s the stages of life, thing, I suppose. If I’d had kids of my own, I’d probably be used to it. At a certain age, you expect to be escorted to surgery by your adult children; you’re probably a grandparent by now.

But it is not the way of my seasons, here in my Village writer, childless, what’s the next project? cocoon. I was expecting the return of the red sports car, the beginning of top-down summer, of my niece pulling into the garage with the Mustang, then taking her to a new joint I’d found with great food and extravagant cocktails.

I don’t want her to see me frightened.

I want to be the cool aunt.