So since the summer, my mom's health has gone downhill incredibly; as she was so sick from the chemo, her body wasn't able to handle anymore, so she had to stop chemo all together (even though her doc was thinking about preparing different types).
So what happens when you stop taking chemo? Cancer metastizes! All over the fucking place. In her brain, mostly.
It didn't metastesize right away. For awhile, in the summer, she was doing really well, and she was even moved out of the hospital at one point and to a rehab center for physical therapy (she had to re-learn to walk after being bed-ridden for so long and being in a coma, etc). But then the cancer returned, and she had to go back to the hospital.
And then it spread. In her brain. They gave her radiation (as they couldn't give her any more chemo anymore), but it could only prolong her life a little; make her more comfortable. It can't stop the inevitable.
Since all of this (points to last post written in April), her decline has been pretty rapid. She still has her moments where she says things that are so "mom". But between all the morphine and the multiple tumours pressing down on her brain, it's kind of obvious that she's going to be acting quite differently.
Sometimes she has a hard time telling me and my sister apart (but she ALWAYS knows who we are), and she constantly forgets things. Like, absolutely no short-term memory at all. Again, to be expected.
Sometimes she says absolutely absurd things. The grammar's all there, but the nouns she'll throw in there are very strange. The best thing I can describe to is that it sounds like someone talking in their sleep. That non-nonsensical absurdity that still meets all grammar standards perfectly. The brain is weird like that.
She's always so happy to see me and my sister, and she definitely has these lucid moments where we have conversations like we always used to have, and I can still make her laugh. A lot. :) Those moments are amazing, to put it mildly. But also, those moments are getting further and further apart.
She is spending more and more of her time sleeping.
And of course, she's a whole province away. I have to take a 10-hour train ride every weekend (4-5 hours there, and then 4-5 hours back) to see her for a couple of days. To say the travel has been completely wearing me down is a huge understatement. I've changed it so that my visits are every second weekend instead, although that fills me with a huge amount of guilt I can't put into words. Nonetheless, the weekly weekend visits are just so hard on me.
It's also so hard to judge how much time she has left. The doctors had originally given her 2 months, and that was...well, about 2 months ago. I've heard of people being given a 2-month life expectancy die less than a week later. But I've also heard of people being given a 2-month life expectancy who end up living a lot longer 2 months. So who knows. I think I've decided on continuing with bi-weekly visits, but am always ready to hop on the next train to Montreal should I get an emergency call.
It's been a walking nightmare, and that's the best way I can describe it. When she first got sick, I had nightmares of how she'd be when the cancer inevitably got worse. Now we're at that point, and I'm literally living out those nightmares. How often does one in life get to do that? Not only is the stuff I kept dreaming about now coming true, but that gloomy, creepy feeling that follows me throughout those dreams...it's around me constantly, every day, in waking life.
It's been a horrible year.
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