Michael Lucas Mourns His Mother

There’s little sunshine in Michael Lucas‘ world at the moment.

As some of you may know, the porn producer’s mother, Yelena Treyvas, recently succumbed to cancer. She was a mere 59-years old.

While some of us haven’t always agreed with Lucas’ political agenda, nobody takes joy in such a loss. Or one shouldn’t, at least.

Lucas certainly ain’t celebrating these days, but the Russian-born 36-year old did find some time to put pen to virtual paper and write up an extensive reflection on his heart-wrenching experience.

Read what went down, how he feels about American doctors’ “heartless” bedside manner and why he can’t sleep at night. After the jump, of course…

It has been 17 days days since my mother passed away.

We were extremely close; the circumstances of her passing were harrowing.

Yelena Treyvas, left this life at age 59. Shortly after turning 50, while still in Russia, she had several surgeries on benign growths. One day, just three months after I brought my family to the U.S., I was on Fire Island when my mother called, sobbing; I could not understand what she was saying. Taking the phone, my father explained that she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

I was on the first boat to the mainland.

Beyond the love we had for each other, my mother and I were best friends. She confided to me about her illness; I aimed to be the strongest possible support. There were times when she would call me as many as twenty times per day, seeking assurance that the cancer could be eradicated. With love in my heart, I helped her maintain a positive outlook.

I had to suppress my own doubts and fears to remain strong for my family. My maternal grandmother and my father often were reduced to crying. As my mother’s condition worsened, as she grew desperate, it became increasingly difficult for me to fight against my internal grief and anxiety to keep strong for her.

She underwent several operations and many rounds of chemotherapy as well as radiation over the course of four years – then in 2006, doctors said the cancer had metastasized to her lungs. “There is nothing we can do.”

American doctors might be expert with the technicalities of medicine but they can be downright heartless in communicating with patients. Neither my mother nor anybody else in my family asked my mother’s doctors to tell us how many months they believed she had to live. Yet they deliver that verdict whether or not you want them to. Instead of leading patients to live as fully as they can for whatever time they have, they mislead them into believing that they must die in hopelessness.

After receiving the Sloan-Kettering doctors’ verdict, my mother took to her bed, remaining there for two weeks. The doctors had very successfully robbed her of all hope, though she was still alive. And unfortunately, she later fell prey to all manner of charlatan – alternate medicine, healers and other unscientific, unscrupulous leeches who know that in such a situation, they can take the patient for any amount of money they have. Though educated and very intelligent, my mother chose to believe that herbs and potions could help her. Together with my father, she made many long trips to see a Brazilian healer. When she became too fragile to take long trips, she started consulting with a Vietnamese herb charlatan in San Francisco. Without ever meeting her, communicating over the phone, he prescribed herbs, at unconscionable prices.

My mother reached a point where she could no longer walk. And unable to speak out loud, she could only whisper. I was tormented within myself by the thought that I should make her go to the hospital, while knowing she was so adamantly against that. After all the years of grueling treatments culminating in a death verdict, my mother refused to see doctors. At the mere suggestion of having a scan, she would panic. She took some sort of comfort from believing the charlatan who told her that her back pain was from rheumatism, that asthma caused the congestion in her throat and that her rapid weight loss was from the chemotherapy treatments.

The day before she died, I was visiting her after having a dispiriting argument with my boyfriend. Before I left, she whispered “There is no shine in your eyes; I hope you will be okay.”