Thousand-yard Stare

I'm back in the Bay Area for a week and a half or so. I needed some R&R, I needed to get some things in order up here, and I needed my siblings to stop relying on me for everything related to caring for my mom and start stepping up to the plate. The only way to do that was to leave. Which kills me because yesterday the docs gave my mom a big dose of prednisone and now--whew!--she can breathe relatively easily. No horrible night-long coughing jags. She actually slept all night and only started coughing around 7. Which means she got up with plenty of energy, and an appetite. She actually got up and walked around the house putting things away and putting some laundry in and entertaining a couple of visitors with some sparkle rather than just gathering her energy and enduring. I wish they'd given her prednisone a while back, when she first started complaining about the shortness of breath and the coughing, so we could've had some up time together. But at any rate: Thank God for 'roids. I'm concerned because the chemo protocol they're proposing doesn't go well with prednisone. There are all sorts of dire warnings about it. But for now, I'm happy because after spending 2.5 weeks hearing her gasping for breath and coughing so terribly that tears streamed down her face and she only slept for moments at a time, I was wrung out and desperate for relief for her. It's horrifying, cancer.

We had a terrific wind storm the other night--trees were blown down, pretty much everything not bolted to ground was moved or toppled, and the power went out at some point in the wee hours. I was sleeping so soundly, for once, that I didn't notice. Mom had stashed her oxygen machine in the bathroom off her bedroom so it wouldn't keep us awake. Problem was, it sounds an alarm when power goes out. Nobody, including Mom (who'd taken a sleep aid) heard it. My aunt, who'd been visiting, woke up and noticed it was ink black outside, no street lights, and came to wake me up. We felt our way into Mom's room, switched her over by feel to her portable oxygen tank, made sure she was OK, and went back to bed. I had to set my cell phone alarm to go off in 2.5 hours, as that's how long the portable tank lasts at her rate of usage. After that I couldn't go back to sleep. Two hours and 15 minutes later, the power came back on. I got up, switched Mom back to her oxygen machine (which we call R2-D2, R2 for short), and finally got an hour or so's sleep.

My mom is a warrior woman. Faced with a terminal diagnosis (recurrent small cell lung cancer), and given the choice of palliative radiation and chemo (with the slim chance it can push her cancer back into remission like the first time around) and hospice care, she didn't hesitate: she chose treatment. She's focused completely on achieving remission, and she wants us to focus there, too. No assuming she's a gonner. No moping around. "The focus has to be on getting me well," she said yesterday. And so we've all swallowed the magic pill. We're going to get her well. I pray nightly to a God I'm not sure hears me, and I pray on, then sleep for another few hours and get up to a pragmatic, biological dawn.

Why I haven't posted (a big fat valid excuse for my 1.3 readers)

I went to Boston with the hunky chemist. It was loads of fun. THen we went to Hawaii, which was loads more fun. On the second to the last day of that trip, we learned my mom's small-cell lung cancer was back, but just in the original single location. They started her on a chemotherapy protocol right away, and she was tolerating it pretty well. A week later, we had Thanksgiving. It was tasty. And a week after that my mom ended up in the hospital with (a) pneumonia, (b) a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung), and (c) tumors in both lungs, threatening to block her major airways. Naturally, I drove like a demon from hades to get back to my hometown--the most beautiful coastal town in California, I might add. Not a bad place to have to go to in an emergency. They kept her in the hospital a week, and now she's home, hooked up to oxygen 100% of the time and taking nine different meds each day, undergoing radiation daily (for 15 days) and then starting a different chemotherapy protocol. The cancer is incurable, but she's hoping treatment will push it back into remission for a little while, or at least shrink the tumors enough so she can breathe easier and hang around longer with us rather than in the next realm with Dad and her parents. I'm learning to be a caregiver. Lucky for me I can telecommute work. Can't so easily telecommute my relationship, so I'm rallying the siblings to be here in shifts in the periods of time when I'm gone.
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The other night Mom and I were watching television together. She was having a good day (no major bouts of coughing, energy relatively up) and wanted to catch up on a show she'd started watching halfway through a season. I have to say it's disturbing when your parent has a terminal disease and yet really loves the show "Six Feet Under." But that's not what made me feel like crying that night. What made me feel like crying that night was the sight of cornflakes falling into my cereal bowl (I was hungry and that's what was handy). For some bizarre reason I don't start tearing up at the tough stuff like Mom not being able to walk down the front porch step for the paper. What hits me hard is weird things like cereal and my email crashing and that Christmas ornament I made when I was in fourth grade and that still hangs, tattered but cheery, on our lighted fir tree.