Staying positive is tough

Today marked 2 weeks since dad passed.  It still seems sort of surreal. Mom and I have had conversations over the past couple days about how we are feeling.  Mom is starting to have a tough time maintaining that positive attitude she’s had for a while.  She is missing dad tremendously.  She wants very much to just scream and cry, but for some reason those emotions won’t come all the way to the surface.  She is left then with anxiety and frustration.  Yesterday she was pacing the floors, unsure what exactly to do with herself.  She also just wants this weekend’s open house to be over so that she doesn’t have to think about it.

The issue with the medication appears to be clear now.  She is not having problems with muscle twitches and she feels less confused, though part of her anxiety is that she has a baseline short term memory issue that causes her to feel like something maybe wrong still.  To me it would appear that she is back to ‘normal’, though there might be a slight degradation in her mental acuity.  If there is degradation, it may be attributed to losing more weight.  Tomorrow we will find out at the oncologist’s office what her weight is at these days.  I would not be surprised if it is near 110 lbs.  Today she saw herself in the mirror after getting out of the shower and realized just how skinny she has become.  For those of you who will be at the open house this coming weekend and have not seen her in a while, well how do I put this… I will just be blunt.  She is skin and bones.  To hug her is like hugging a skeleton.  I don’t say that to be mean, it’s just how it is.  I got contact information for a nutritionist to see if/how we can get some meat back on her bones.  There are really two problems to nutrition for her.  The first is that the cancer is voracious and loves to eat whatever she is putting in her belly.  The other thing is that she cannot eat a lot without much discomfort because the liver tumors take up quite a bit of room.  Hopefully we can figure something out and get some weight back on.

Today mom and Jason spent the majority of the day together.  They were out of the house for about 7 hours, having a fun time at local indian casinos.  I am so glad that they got out for the day and that mom did something outside of the house that wasn’t related to her illness or dad’s passing.  We are unable to spend the mornings on Mon, Wed and Friday at the gym because for the next 2 weeks the gym is getting a makeover.  They are putting all new equipment in and rearranging the layout.  It will be nice to see new equipment, but it sucks not having the gym available for 2 weeks.  We are able to go to their other locations, but those locations are not exactly close and would require getting on the freeway, which in the morning is a nightmare.  So we are going to have to find things to do, to fill that time.  I know there are things that mom wants to do, so I just need to convince her that now is the perfect time to do them.

During one of our conversations this morning, mom was expressing some negative thoughts.  She said that she just wants this to be over.  She asked me how I am coping and stated that I must be wishing that she was gone already so that I could have my life back.  I told her that she was wrong, that I do not for a minute think that way.  I told her that she needs to find that positive attitude she used to have.  I know that life for her is extremely difficult.  I really cannot understand just how difficult it is, but I figure it must be great.  Not only is she grieving the loss of her husband, but she has her own illness to deal with as well.  She doesn’t feel very good a lot of the time, she is frustrated that she cannot do tasks she once found simple, she hates not being able to remember things and she is scared that she getting worse means losing her mind or placing a burden on people.  So I get that life pretty much sucks for her and she has every reason to feel down.  Hopefully she can overcome that with the reasons she has to be positive.  There is another thing bothering her a lot, there are people who should be close in her life that have been distant.  (I won’t name them, but I will know what I mean by this for future reference.)  She doesn’t understand this and doesn’t understand what she could have done so bad that these people would not even come over or call, especially after my father’s passing.  It upsets her deeply.

So life is not all peaches and cream these days.  We take it one day at a time and get through each day the best we can.  We hope that there will be a tomorrow and that tomorrow will be just a little bit easier than today.  We are thankful for the small things, like mom getting to drive yesterday (she did a fine job behind the wheel!  I wasn’t concerned) or mom being pain free longer than usual.  We are thankful that the dreaded Lyrica is out of her system and that she can hold the phone to her ear again without her arm trembling so bad that she needs to hold the phone with both hands.  We are thankful that today was a good day.

Tomorrow is chemo day again.  Here’s hoping that it goes well!