My mother escaped neuropathy until April, four months into her chemotherapy. Her oncologist asked her to walk on her heels, and she could not raise the balls of her feet to do so, so he removed the vincristine from her chemo recipe and told her that the neuropathy should reduce on its own. Probably. From the laurelwood rocking chair in the living room, my father tells my mother that his neuropathy feels like burning, like nerves firing and misfiring and friendly firing in his feet. In his hands and arms, half will go numb at a time. My mother, reclining on the couch under her electric throw, nods.
My father’s late mother had neuropathy; his aunt K., at age 93, can’t feel most of her legs. K. says, with a twinkle, “When I feel like I’m going to fall, I aim for something soft, push my Life Alert, and four strong, handsome men come to pick me up.” My mother’s friend F. calls with news that she’s missed several of her cancer treatments because of the neuropathy. At the Mayo Clinic, where we have gone for a second opinion on my father’s neuropathy, the doctor snaps a tuning fork against his hand, tells him to close his eyes, and then touches the tuning fork to my father’s foot, his ankle, his shin. “Feel the buzz?” he asks. Sometimes my father says yes; sometimes he says no. We are a family of musicians, my mother a pianist so talented that these months of silent piano seem incredibly wrong. A440—the pitch standard to which instruments are tuned—means something to us.
A LACK OF B12 can cause damage to the nervous system and affect brain functions, leading to a higher incidence of depression, memory issues, and general fatigue. Perhaps this is the root of how nerves came to be both physical and mental: the physical location in the body of some emotional or personality excess—or lack of fortitude. With amusement, I hear Mrs. Bennet’s lament to her husband: “You have no compassion on my poor nerves!” and Mr. Bennet’s quipped reply: “You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.” Even Jane Austen knew how emotional nerves are gendered, how my mother’s nerves are considered emotional in ways that don’t apply to my father’s nerves.
The doctor is convinced that my father’s neuropathy is genetic—and it will continue to progress—so there’s very little he can do to prevent more damage. The doctor is surprised that my father has never smoked, and, since alcohol can affect nerves, he tells my father that he is allowed only one drink a week. When we get home, I take a bottle of Shiner Bock out of the fridge and use it to make bread in my cast iron skillet and hope that my mother will feel well enough to eat it.
AT SOME POINT, all nerves get old. The body cannot regenerate in ways it is accustomed to doing. They talk about the cumulative effect of cancer treatment, how it takes longer to recover as the chemotherapy builds in the tiniest places in the body—in the nerves, in the white blood cells—and what used to take three days for my mother to recover some sense of normalcy now takes ten. We think of this, now, as normal, because my mother is sixty-six years old, not as young as she once was, and this is cancer; this is chemotherapy. This is what we should expect.
But even young nerves can be abused, never to recover, the perfection of a child’s bones and nerves and skin damaged permanently. My mother’s is a childhood cancer, and it is very rare in adults; as a result, her chemotherapy is extrapolated from what they would give an eight-year-old. We are told that she is not given the full dose they would give to a child, because adults cannot tolerate it as well the young. Neuropathy is not as much of a concern for them. My father stepped on glass when he was a child, and the nerve damage on the bottom of his foot meant we could not tickle him there, no matter how often he danced his fingers over the soles of our feet. As the result of a Buck knife and an onion while camping, I’ve lost feeling on the inside of my left thumb. But we have been raised in mind-over-matter, the battle metaphors of cancer, the fighting, that if you believe hard enough, deep enough, right enough, if your faith is strong enough, you can make your body do what you want. I wonder about emotional nerves, battered and scarred to a point beyond recovery. Certainly the force of will can be incredible, like the teenage sister of my high school best friend who was diagnosed with stage-four bone cancer but determined to walk down the aisle at her wedding. She did. Fifteen years later, my friend named her own daughter in her sister’s memory.
WE ARRIVE HOME, and I put my thrifted Cousances-Le Creuset dutch oven named Phyllis on the front burner to simmer soup for dinner, that gorgeous cheerful shade of cobalt blue—Co—and I think about how cobalt is part of B12. I wonder if I could form an entire alphabet of neuropathy if I tried, if this is a new language I can create and put on the table. I watch these colors and chemicals, thinking about what I can do to prevent my own neuropathy, feeling twinges and vibrations in my own feet and wondering when—not if—I will start to lose the feeling in my feet, to be replaced by burning nerves. Some mornings, I wake up terrified that it has started, because my father’s neuropathy started when he was about my age, even as I know that the dead feeling in my heels just means I slept too long on my back. It is not something I believe I can escape, this inevitability of pain and deterioration and the movement of the body from one day into the next. Sometimes I think that the Miracle of Modern Medicine should shield us from this kind of inherited pain, the long-term kind, the kind that prevents us from going about our day doing the things we love to do. But that is not the way of the world, and that is not the way of chronic diseases, because we do not talk about neuropathy or ALS or MS or any other debilitating disease in the same way we do cancer. We don’t say my father should fight harder against his neuropathy. Perhaps we need to build our vocabulary from scratch, to shift our metaphors, to build sound from silence in the way the planet spins itself into mornings that turn the snow from blue to white, muffling the outside so my mother can sleep off her chemotherapy in peace, the way my mother’s piano remains silent, absent her fingers.
Karen Babine is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer (Milkweed Editions, 2019) and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life (University of Minnesota, 2015). She also edits Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Her nonfiction and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, River Teeth, North American Review, Slag Glass City, Sweet, Georgia Review, and has been listed as a Notable in Best American Essays. She teaches at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash