We don’t go to restaurants or get takeout very often. We both prefer my cooking, one of my great pleasures. In America, I’ve taken advantage of the freedom of a previously unimaginable selection of foods by cooking as often as I can. I’ve prepared our meals for years, no matter what my day was like, no matter if I was going through chemo for breast cancer or recovering from a mastectomy or brain surgery. After every marathon and triathlon that I’ve raced, I’ve returned home tired but beaming with happiness and prepared our dinner. Usually it’s something simple and healthy: pasta with stir-fried vegetables and grated Parmesan; baked fish, roasted potatoes, and arugula salad; chicken stir-fried with sweet peas, tomatoes, and onions, and spiced with lots of hot red pepper. Mirek and I love to sit in our spacious dining room overlooking the woods enjoying glasses of wine—or, more often, a bottle. We share the events of our day, relive a road race, discuss what I talked about with Kasia or Witek or Maria in our daily conversations. This is our sacred time for relaxing and catching up with each other. Our dinners last at least two hours. To mark the end of the meal, we drink strong, hot tea.
Now, as I stare at the bits of plastic in the toilet, I regret the decision to break from our ritual.
The restaurant filled the pizza with plastic! Pieces of plastic bags! To make the pizza look bigger so they could charge more money! I should have known! The cheese was so white, weirdly white, with a crumpled texture too strange to be real food. It didn’t taste like real, crunchy pizza. The bottom was soaked in some kind of odd liquid. And the top! Covered with chewy, inedible plastic!
I am seething. We’ve been poisoned!
“Mirek! Wake up!” I rush into the bedroom. “The pizza! It’s poison! It was made of plastic!”
He sits up in bed and tries to calm me.
“It isn’t poison,” he says gently. “The pizza wasn’t that good, but there was no plastic or anything like that in it.”
“No, listen to me,” I say. “I just threw it all up. The pizza was made of plastic! I saw it floating in the toilet. The cheese was plastic, the crust was plastic.”
“But I didn’t get sick,” he says soothingly. “Don’t you think your vomiting was a reaction to yesterday’s infusion?”
“Don’t you believe me?” I grow more agitated. “I saw it. I saw the plastic. They are poisoning us!”
He gently pats my back, asks if he can get me some water. “Come lie down, try to sleep,” he urges. “You’ll feel better.”
I announce we will never eat there again. Mirek agrees. But as he falls back asleep, I lie beside him, angry and suspicious.
Why won’t Mirek see what’s going on? Why is he defending the pizza place?
In the morning, I call Kasia and tell her that the pizza place down the street tried to poison us with plastic.
“Mom,” she says carefully, “I think you should call Dr. Atkins or his nurses.” I can hear the concern in her voice. “Please call them.”
“It’s not me! It’s the pizza place!” Why won’t Kasia believe me?
“Mom? Will you please call them?” she presses.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I say. “It was only that awful pizza. Never mind. It’s already passed.”
On Wednesday and Thursday, I drive myself to the office in the morning and spend uneventful days at the brain bank. Thursday after work, I go swimming at the local pool, then go food shopping. When I get home with the groceries, I tell Mirek that I’m feeling very well. But after dinner, when I sit at the computer to continue writing my life stories, Mirek notices that I’m having trouble typing. He also sees that I have no idea how much I’m struggling; I don’t notice that some of my words are mangled. Mirek says nothing to me but heads upstairs to telephone Kasia. They talk about the incident with the pizza and the splitting headache I had that night. They’re very concerned about my behavior.
Early the next morning, Friday, Kasia calls me.
“I really think you should contact Dr. Atkins,” Kasia says. “I’ll draft an e-mail to him and send it to you. You can forward it to his nurses.”
A few minutes later I receive the note that Kasia wants me to send:
My daughter wanted to bring this up, though I feel fine. She is worried that there may be subtle changes in my driving and perhaps in thinking (mild forgetfulness, forgetting to turn at the right intersection). This could be from stress, feeling down, or something else. Given the ongoing headaches and especially the severe headache I had the other day she is concerned about swelling or inflammation around the brain lesions. Can you bring this up with Dr. A. and see what he thinks. Many thanks.
I am furious. My own daughter is betraying me.
Kasia is a very smart physician, and I know that she’s upset and worried about me. But she is being hysterical and irrational. And she’s really overstepping her bounds! As if there’s something wrong with me!
I have my own very good mind, and I have much more life experience than she does. Everyone in the family respects my intuition and judgment, not only about my own well-being but about the health of all of us. Kasia may be an experienced doctor, but she calls me when she doesn’t feel well. She calls me when her kids are sick, and not just to share her worries and seek comfort. She always wants my advice. Mom, do you think it’s serious? Should I call the pediatrician? What if the fever gets worse? What if . . . I always tell her what I would do, and more often than not, she follows my advice. I am still her wise, trusted mother, after all. So why is she treating me like this?
I e-mail Kasia back:
I will not write it, maybe I will
