Y is for Yankauer

First, I had to learn how to spell yankauer—I thought it was spelled yonker, the way everyone in the hospital pronounced it, rhyming it with ‘honk’. It’s named after the inventor, Sidney Yankauer (yank-hour), who created a magnificent suction tip (1907) that is still in use after all these years. We preferred my mother’s pet name for the yankauer, and hearing her say, “where’s my youngster?”

She relied on the slim blue suction tip for the last three months of her life after her esophagus was compressed by a tumour mass from fourth stage breast cancer. She couldn’t eat or drink or even swallow her own saliva. The yankauer lived in her right hand.

It was with her through a long stretch of a prairie winter; day in and day out, at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon; on a trek to Regina’s Pasqua Hospital for a home nutrition program; and then back home to her bedroom that resembled a hospital room. The ‘youngster’ lived with her after a trip back to RUH emergency after she developed pneumonia, and then, one day, she released it from her hand in St. Paul’s Palliative unit, where she died a few days later.

Our trek to Pasqua Hospital in Regina, was to learn how to manage my mother’s home IV nutrition, also know as Total Parenteral Nutrition. We joked about our prairie road trip in March—not exactly the Viking Cruise in the Mediteranean that she had been dreaming about. She arrived by ambulance in the middle of the night — I was terrified the ambulance would get stuck in a snow drift. It reminded me of all the worry I have about my son whenever he travels. I had clearly become the mother of my mother.

I slept in the hotel next door and sometimes, in the middle of the night, got a call that the yankauer wasn’t working and the nurse wouldn’t believe her. It was a constant anxiety, because it was her lifeline. We learned how to keep the line clear, how to watch the cannister to see if it needed changing, and always making sure the line wasn’t gummed up before she went to bed.

A note from my journal in February, one month before she died:

Repetition and Routine:
The number of times I wash your dentures, straighten a sheet, fix your pillows, lay a yankauer on your lap. Here it is, mama—with your call bell. You pat yourself down and recite back to me: Yankauer, here. Call bell, here. Then you reach with your right hand to find your phone, asking where it is. I reach your hand to touch it and we both say, 'here' at the same time. We try to get the night nurses onto the routine so the table is back on the right side close to your one good arm. I even made a sign and taped it to the side table:
PLEASE PUT MARJALEENA’S TABLE ON HER RIGHT SIDE SO SHE CAN REACH HER PHONE. SHE NEEDS HER YANKAUER AND HER CALL BELL BACK ON HER BELLY. THANKS!

I’m working on this poem for my mother. She would have liked the title.

Y is for Yankauer and Yankee Go Home
Y is for Yankauer, a lifesaving tool
slender and blue,
in my mother's right hand,
her last winter in Saskatoon.
Y is for a letter
that sounds like a question,
keeping it quiet inside your head,
because the mouth has been banned.
Y is for my mother yelling, Yankee Go Home!
Protesting all the US imperialist wars,
right through to March 2026, when she said, "turn off the TV",
and called the news, Murder, Inc.
Y is for Yep,
a text from my son in the affirmative,
the way it sounds hopeful and upbeat,
the E between the Y and the P.
Y is for Yliopisto—university in Finnish
and yesterday, finding photos at the bottom of a trunk.
My mother, wildly beautiful and beaming
 —her university days in Helsinki.
July 2026
Marjaleena Repo: Dec 27, 1937 (Helsinki, Finland) - March 28, 2026 (Saskatoon, Canada)