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.