It’s been a rough week this week. Not due to some quirky cosmic energy flow but because my mom is getting sicker and friends and family keep seeking me out for comfort. It’s simply exhausting. If you knew how tired I am of hearing "You’re just so strong," from folks who apparently cannot cope without me, you would have to laugh – or cry. One way or the other.
Really, I have no cause for complaint – I’m healthy and I can do pretty much anything I want to do, at any time I want to do it. I watch Mom, having to allow us to vacuum her floors or clean her cat’s litter box and I know it’s got to be insanely hard to ask for that kind of help. Doesn’t matter that it’s a pleasure for all of us to help her in any way we can – the asking would still be difficult for such an independent person.
Picking up her chemo at the clinic last night was a strange sort of thing. How such a small bottle can hold so much poison and be worth so much money is a wonder. Almost three thousand dollars’ worth of pills that will kill you while they’re killing the cancer because chemo kills indiscriminately. They pump you full of toxic waste that makes you feel like dying so that you can live a few weeks longer. I’m sure to some, it seems reasonable.
At least the chairlift people managed to get that installed so she’s able to get up the stairs with her broken-and-un-fixable hip. Her pain meds have been tripled and her pain stays at "Oh, about a seven." That’s on a scale of 1-10. There’s cancer in her bones and cancer in her liver and cancer in her throat. "It’s an aggressive cancer," they say, and it’s good they pointed that out because I’m clearly not bright enough to grasp the obvious. And she keeps giving me all her clothes because she’s so tiny now that nothing fits anyway.
For me, it’s been a rough week. But I’m healthy and I have no cause for complaint.
