TGIF

Made it to Friday. Was supposed to be off today, but Mike got sick and I had to cover for him. So in I went. It didn't totally suck. And there was a really good lunch - tasty and also free, with good company. Can't beat that.

Mom's mastectomy is scheduled for 10:30 on Monday. We have to get her there at 8am. I'll post an update here and on FB afterwards.

I'm a little anxious. She's worried about the surgery, I'm worried about the recovery. Together we've got it covered, I guess.

Going to be a busy weekend getting everything wrapped up before Monday. Plus my cousin is in town this weekend, and I'm going to hang out with her and my aunt and uncle Saturday night. Definitely looking forward to that. And I'm taking my dad to coffee on Sunday for Fathers' Day. Will probably spend of Sunday with them. We'll see how things go...

Cats n dogs

What a week.

Wednesday was the big day of oncology appointments for my mom. It's been a year since the stroke now so they're entertaining the idea that something more definitive can be done for the tumor. We saw surgical oncology, radiation oncology, and medical oncology. The team is definitely moving towards surgery and chemo/radiation. I think that's a good sign. There was a day when they wouldn't have entertained the idea at all because she has some questionable evidence of metastatic disease (although her medical oncologist doesn't think it's anything, actually), and that day wasn't more than a couple of years ago. But the fact that they're even ready to consider surgery makes me feel like there's a good chance at extending my mother's life.

The day itself was productive, of course, but crazy stressful. We were both really anxious about what they were going to say, not to mention about the whole process itself. As it turns out, we get to be anxious a little longer. They found something questionable on the mammo of the other breast, so they need to do further testing before they can actually make a plan. So we follow up again the first week of April to do the scheduling and more definitive talking. My mom has friends coming to visit at the end of April, so I suspect when we all put our heads together they're going to schedule the surgery in May. Which is helpful for me, too, because I'll me on Consults for May and June, and the scheduling is more flexible.

It does leave my planned trip to Chicago at the end of this month in question, however, because of some of the testing they've got scheduled. My mom is pushing me to go, of course, but I'm still not convinced.

In other convalescence news...Olga is getting stronger by the day. She's still on the ventilator but has done very well off of heart-lung bypass. Unfortunately, though, as a complication of the bypass, her foot didn't get perfused well enough (they focus on perfusing the important things - brain, heart, kidneys - and sometimes the peripheral stuff doesn't get enough blood flow. And let's face it Olga's feet are a looooong way from her brain) and had to be amputated on Friday. I can't even imagine how hard that's going to be for her. Olga's kind of a fashionista, you know? Cute shoes. Cute skirts. Cute toes. Well, I mean, the shoes are still in...and there are a lot of cute pants...and we can still go for manicures.

But in both cases...I can't imagine losing a piece of myself. I mean, like, a real, visible piece of myself (I say this as someone who has already lost most of her accessory organs). Whether a mastectomy or a foot amputation, there's a very obvious void created, you know? But at the same time, I'm amazingly glad both Olga and my mother have both thusfar survived something that could have killed them. It's a steep price, but compared to the alternative...

Life gets so complicated sometimes.

In related news, we have a new little houseguest.

Her name is Gulan (it means "Cutie" in Swedish), and she is Olga's cat. She's been staying with some friends, but their dogs aren't so cat friendly and they can't let her out because they live in coyote country (real, wild coyotes, not Maggie-like coyotes-once-removed). So she was living in their utility room in their basement. It seemed kind of inhumane, so they looked for alternatives, and I figured it was the least I could do. So we brought her here today. She keeps hissing at Maggie, but Mags is being very respectful. I'm sure they'll be just fine.

I did, however, forget about two things when I offered to do this... my hatred of litterboxes (haaaaaaate) and my cat allergy.

I addressed the one by irrationally spending an obscene amount of money I don't have on a self-cleaning litterbox (Hate. Hate. Hate.). I totally can't justify this at all, unless of course the cat moves in permanently, which is not the plan. I'm sure Olga will want her cat back in a couple of months, and I can go back to my cat-dander-free existence. And I can probably sell the litterbox on Craigslist. Until then, self-cleaning litter and a good dose of antihistamines should get us through.

She's a sweet old thing. Who's currently hiding somewhere in my house where I can't find her.

I do hope she remembers where that fancy litterbox is.........

Tried and true

I had dinner at Shady Pines tonight, after taking my mom to the oncologist (she's good. He's happy. We see the surgeon in six weeks. Still planning to go before the tumor board). We had dinner with their usual dinner mates, Edna and Alan, as well as this couple that joins them fairly regularly, Ollie and Olivia. The latter, it turns out, have been married for a month less than my mother has been alive. I mean, my mom's not old, but in marriage years, that's a lot! Ollie has dementia. Olivia has really bad breast cancer. And yet they're still as sweet on each other as you can imagine. They're hilarious, actually - they "bicker" back and forth like nobody's business. I imagine they've been doing that since they were teenagers. And they're just a riot; they could seriously take that act on the road. Too funny.

Olivia and I were talking tonight about the cancer, and I was saying that she was holding up really well through the extensive chemo for the two different kinds of breast cancer that she has. And she was like, "Honey, what else could I do? Throwing a fit wasn't going to heal it. You just keep going."

I like that. And I'm really glad she and my mom are friends. I think she's going to be a great role model for my mom if her treatment comes to chemo and radiation.

It's my blog, and I'll whine if I want to

So this particular blog entry comes with a disclaimer. Believe it or not, I keep a lot of personal shit off the blog. But I'm having one of those days weeks months moments when I just...don't care. To the best of my knowledge, no one who's about to be mentioned reads my blog, so it's probably not you (although you may know the players involved, keep it to yourself). No, I don't know that I want to talk about it. I just want to bitch.

I'm not doing so well. I'm going to be honest. I'm in a pretty dark place right now. I generally hold up the facade remarkably well, and even that is starting to falter. I'm finding myself much more negative these days than I want to be.

Friday was a horrible day. I got chewed out at work by my boss. I cried in her office for 45 minutes, after which I ran into the person I least wanted to see right then and had to walk straight into a family meeting. What almost makes it worse for me is that she thinks she's helping. I'm not going to perseverate any longer on whether she's right or wrong or just looking at part of the picture, because it's irrelevant. Yes, I'm off my game at work, because my entire life seems to be busy imploding. I'm not saying it's okay. I'm saying please give me some consideration for the fact that many people would not look okay from day to day. Please hear me when I say I don't understand what I'm doing wrong in any sort of prospective way. Please understand that I'm a little bit fragile right now and treat me accordingly. And know that my professional identity is such a part of the core of who I am, that right now I'm going to internalize every moment of potential criticism.

Friday after work, I spent an hour sitting outside the hospital in my car waiting for them to discharge my dad. And mostly crying. They finally let him loose, and I took him home, and promptly got into an argument with my parents about what essentially boils down to a tension between their needs and mine. I'm trying to keep my head above water, and I'm feeling like no one is acknowledging what I need. I don't care if that need doesn't get met, truly; I just want someone to recognize the kind of pain I'm in from the fact that my life currently sucks in multiple ways and both my parents are actively dying.

Meanwhile, I have this friend who is being remarkably ambivalent about what kind of friends we are. No, that's not true. I'm interpreting this friend's actions as ambivalence; in truth, they may be clear in a way I can't currently see, there's no way to know. But I feel it very acutely right now. I'm as needy as I get, which frankly isn't usually asking too much. I just want some consistency. I just want to know where I stand. And I just want, mostly, to feel like I have consistent support. I don't want anything to be this complicated right now.

And then, of course, there's this particular circle of friends that I have. And there's a developing schism in that group. I, truly, have no idea what to do about this. I feel like I'm going to need to choose a side in the near future, and I don't want to. It's not fair. I don't want to feel like my friends are choosing a side of this division over me, and I don't want to feel like I'll have to relinquish those friendships to stay neutral. Because then I might as well have chosen a side, which  feels like a lose/lose for me. I really value people on both sides. And I don't like being strewn akimbo in this process.

I'm feeling so unbelievably incompetent in pretty much every corner of my life these days. Personal, filial, romantic, professional, familial. I feel like a failure as a grown up. I pretty much hate my life right now. And in the middle of all of this chaos, on goes my personal work in therapy - dealing with my issues, figuring out who I am, what I want, and what's authentically me, trying to understand the things that repeatedly get in my way.

I want my life back. I want myself back. And I don't know how to get there.

Blog's gone pink

No, no, this isn't some infectious overgrowth from the pink office. And I promise, it's just for the month.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Now, I often complain about how much ridiculous pink-ness shows up in the name of Breast Cancer. I get mad about how damn much funding Breast Cancer Awareness gets (not research, they can have all the money they want, but the pink explosion). 1 in 9 American women gets breast cancer. 1 in 3 women worldwide (1 in 4 in America) will be sexually abused or assaulted.

I mean....talk about needing awareness.

But, given this past year....my aunt's diagnosis with Stage II Breast CA, her subsequent journey through chemo and radiation... my mom's diagnosis with Stage IV Breast CA, and the stroke that I still think resulted from it...

Looks like I'm jumping on the pink bandwagon.

Hiatus

Sorry I've been silent the past two days, y'all. We're in NC, finally; I haven't had internet for the past two days, because I'm staying at the retirement resort with my mom.

Seriously. This place is like a cruise ship that doesn't move. It's amazing.

Today was the Day of a Billion Appointments. Well, three, but it still turned into a 10 hour day. My mom saw Neurology, Rehab Medicine, and then finally Oncology. All three went well. Her (internationally known) oncologist walks in the room, sticks out his hand and says, "Hi, I'm Hy. I'm sort of a breast cancer specialist, you know?" He seems optimistic, and not in an unreasonable way. My mom and I both felt a LOT better after talking with him.

I think I'm going back to work Thursday, finally. Hooray!

Meanwhile, I'm going to bed. I'm not sure I've ever been this tired in my entire life....

Steady on

So it's 4am here in Ohio. We managed to actually get out of Chicago, me and Claudia and my mom, and get underway. We have relatives here, so this seemed like a good stopping point and chance to catch up with them. Apparently I haven't seen these people in over five years. Which is insane, because I really like these relatives.

Getting my mom out of the hospital proved to be a longer and more obnoxious venture than planned; "oh, sure, she can be out by 11 at the latest" turned into nearly 1pm. It was a long drive, but nice to see the relatives. 8 hours to go tomorrow. I'm hoping I can muster a little less insomnia tomorrow....

We are never broken

Barb (of So The Thing Is... fame) has a new blog, called Listening for a Change, about finding joy in the everyday. I love and highly support this idea.

There's a Jungian concept called synchronicity, wherein two events that seem causally unrelated occur together in some sort of meaningful way, which (this is where it differs from coincidence) belies a larger system at work. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, for a number of reasons, some of them a bit spooky.

This comes up again with Barb's most recent post, Hands. Watching my mom after the stroke, doing three hours of PT and OT every day, struggling to find ways to do the smallest tasks with her right hand that would normally be so mindless... It's remarkable to watch her and her fellow rehab patients. We have ways to adapt the world to them, to a degree (like how yesterday I couldn't find a spoon that didn't have a giant grip adjuster on it). We have ways to help them adapt to the world, to an extent (walkers and wheelchairs and sock pullers and grabbers). But nothing is the same. Even her left arm is a little weaker, which is common after a contralateral brain injury. But it makes you slow down and think about a lot that we take for granted. Like being able to type this blog post - my mom has been an executive secretary for close to 45 years. Her first sign that something was amiss was when she lost her ability to type. Subsequently, she lost her ability to read, to walk, to understand language as well as she had, to do such simple things as dress herself. It's been a humbling experience, certainly for her, but also for those of us around her who are observant and sensitive.

But in the tragedy of all this change, despite its sudden and concerted efforts at derailing her life and irrevocably altering mine, there is a great deal of amazing. It's forced both of us to take a step back, to slow down, to think about the breakdown of things we would normally not even notice. Every moment becomes a triumph. Little successes become magnified. But the thing is, they should've been that important to begin with; they've always been magnificent.

I'm reminded, too, even though I spend every single day wading through the minefields of the psyche, what a remarkable piece of equipment the brain is. The progress my mom has made just within the week is extraordinary. We used to think - easily in my lifetime - that you were born with the same number of neurons you died with, and the brain couldn't repair itself. Which is nonsense. While it seems to be accurate that mature neurons don't divide (at least, the last I heard), we're starting to realize they're far more plastic and resilient that we've ever imagined. When one part of the brain takes a hit, other parts rev up and compensate to minimize the deficits. The chatter works a little like a bad phone line at first, but as the brain makes more and more new neuronal connections, the reception clears up. Knowing the nervous system as I do, having even the vaguest idea what goes on in there - seeing my mother button her shirt becomes like seeing the hand of God in her.

I spent a good deal of time today thinking about the muscles we use to let go of something (there's a great deal of poetry about that, I think). In OT today my mom was trying to put pegs in a board with her right hand. And as her muscles fatigued, she could still get her hand clamped around the peg and push the peg into the board, but she had trouble releasing the peg. And I thought, huh. People totally take that for granted. We all assume letting go is a passive process - you just stop holding on and it's over. But that's not at all true - you have multiple muscles in your arm and hand dedicated just to the extension of your fingers. There are hundreds of tiny movements involved in just picking up a pencil and setting it down again.

Imagine how much energy is involved in letting go of the big things in life. But you can't carry around that peg forever.

Thank heaven it's almost Saturday....

...because holy crap, today sucked.

It was just long and awful for a number of reasons. And instead of whining, I give you this, which is fun and amusing.

Enjoy.

Pseudobulbar affect

Have I explained this yet? Forgive me if I have, my brain's on a little bit crooked these days.

Pseudobulbar affect is this thing that happens to people after strokes and certain brain injuries, wherein you rather lose the ability to modulate how you express your emotions. So whatever you feel, it just comes right out. My friend and local neurologist, the Pocket Narcissist, once described this quite aptly as "emotional incontinence." You feel it, out it comes - splat.

My mom has always been a tenderhearted soul, but now bursts into tears at least five times a day. It doesn't last long, and it's very sincere, which is sort of sweet. It tends to happen when people are nice to her more than when she's upset about something. When she's sad, or frustrated, she just looks really, really sad (enough that it frequently makes me want to cry).

But then, there's the other side of it, which is completely delightful. When she's happy, at times she gets downright giddy. A great example of this happened today, when my mom and I were working with the PT on skills to get her in and out of the car, which involves standing very close, facing each other. The physical therapist is this very tall, lanky, skinny girl, which is a notable contrast to my frame. My mother, of course, is short, and so when the PT and I switched places, I made the offhand comment to her that there may be a pretty big difference in how my mom fit together than they did, and the therapist (I heart her) is like, well, right, the boobs. I commented that, after all, it was my mom's fault that I had them, but regardless, I would try not to suffocate my mother.

This culminated, of course, in me trying to lift my mother out of the wheelchair and her not being able to help at all because she had suddenly collapsed into a fit of giggles when I bent over to help her.

It was hysterical.

It's also nice to be able to see my mom excited about things, stuff as simple as watching her play the Wii today (yep. As part of her rehab. Frickin' awesome) and being all smiles when she did a kickass job even though she was bowling with her right (weak) hand.

She's making a lot of progress. I was telling her this evening that, even though she was totally exhausted and felt like shit, I could see noticeable improvement in her function in her right hand and in her gait and balance since even this morning. She gave me this wide-eyed, exhausted but incredulous look and said, "really??" I was like, totally. Absolutely. And then she nodded and smiled and said, "Wow. I hope so."

It's been so hard on her, this whole endeavor. Not that it hasn't been hard on me, or my dad, or any of the three hundred family members and friends who've called, sent cards, or dropped in (you guys rick, by the way). But it's changed her whole self-identity. It's activated a lot of her issues and poked hard at a lot of sore spots. And tired, frustrated, and sad though she may at times be, she's met the challenge.

The silver lining of all of this is, of course, that it's been really nice to have this time with my folks. My mom and I make a really good team, but we've had a lot of experiences together I think she'd hoped we'd never have to deal with. It's afforded us a certain bond and intimacy, though, that's irreplaceable and completely worth it. Likewise, it's been nice to have breakfasts and dinners with my dad, time to problem solve and plot and plan together, to work on forging forward. And the support and kindness of my friends both local and distant is totally priceless.

There's a long road still ahead of us, of course. But we're starting out strong and we have a good network. You can't ask for much more than that.

Blurgh.

It's been a rough day. I can't promise cohesive thought tonight.

My mom is probably going to stay another week, which means I'm staying in Chicago another week, in part because they want to train me to be her primary caregiver until she's totally rehabbed. Which is okay, and I understand and agree with the team's recommendation, and I participated in the decision to stay, and I really want my mom to get the best chance at independence, here, and I also appreciate having another week where I can go out with my Chicago crew for lunch or dinner or just hang out while knowing that my mom is in a safe place under good care.

But while the decision to stay is on the whole a good one, I'm not as enthusiastic about delaying my return to NC for another week. I miss my dog. A lot. I miss my NC friends. I miss my own bed and all the things that are comfortable and familiar in my daily life. And I have a boatload of patients over whom I'm so protective that I routinely work with fevers or migraines because I'd rather go in than take a sick day and disrupt my patient care.

But, this is life.

I got some other irritating news today, that Cleo's mortgage guy could not in fact work miracles and get me a reasonable mortgage because my student loan company is sucking the life out of me (and my credit score, and my debt/income ratio). We may still be able to pull a rabbit out of that particular hat, but, it's definitely contributing to the crank factor.

And, I've been sticking to a fairly set (although not particularly rigid) meal plan this week (and going forward), which is stressing me out in its own right, not to mention that whole handling-a-lot-of-stress-without-using-the-eating-disorder component (which is surprisingly not awful, given the whole structured-but-flexible thing). The packing lunch/snacks is nice when I'm eating non-hospital food, but the logistics...well, it was better tonight than last night. In part because I didn't stress out tonight about if I was going to be able to find a microwave tomorrow, etc, etc. But, I need to be well-fueled for this whole endeavor, and maintain my immune system, and take care of myself so I can do all of that other caretaking. 

Which is something I really keep striving to remember. And which is never something I've done particularly well. But, one has to start retraining themselves sometime.

Well, now, this time it's not my fault.

I don't know what happened to yesterday's post. It never posted. It still refuses to post. @#$*&!!!

Oh, and? %.

Fortunately, I didn't say much. Mom is tired and frustrated, but good (they're wearing her out over there). I went to group PT with her this am; it put a whole other spin on "group therapy," of course. They'd abbreviated it "STG" on her schedule; we couldn't figure out what this was. Turns out it means Standing Group Therapy. Because apparently "Cantankerous Old People Doing Silly Tasks and Having Fun Despite Themselves Group" was too complicated an acronym. I laughed, probably inappropriately, more than once at the old guy next to my mom who kept missing his mark and saying, "Oh, shit!"

I'm a redhead again. And have a great new cut and a gallon of shampoo. And sore abs from laughing so hard this evening. But now, it's 1:30 in the morning (I started this post about 10 hours ago) and I need to be back at the hospital in a mere 6 hours, so I'm going to go to bed. More tomorrow. No, really.

It's just good advice

So yesterday, one of my relatives starts yelling at me for (among other things) not putting my mother in the car and making her get a mammogram.

I....really, though? Have you MET my mother? I love her - dearly, and a lot - and that is how I can tell you, ain't no one going to make that happen except my mother.

All I can do from this is learn for my own well-being. And offer you all this piece of advice:

(I know Carol will back me up on this one)

Mom's doing pretty well. Still in the ICU, probably discharging tomorrow or Tuesday. We'll see. Dad's holding up. I'm really tired. Had dinner with the local crew tonight; my niece and nephews are too cute for words.