Mom is back home from the hospital. We still are not sure what was going on because of the two different stories we were hearing. It may have been her gall bladder or it may have been her liver causing the pain and nausea. Mom is still experiencing some nausea, but no vomiting so for now we are going to just see how things go.
I can’t say that life is back to normal now. With each of these little episodes life for us changes in little ways. We are a bit more on edge wondering when the next hospital visit will come along. We also have to make dietary changes that quite frankly are frustrating. The recommendation from the doctors was to go on a low-fat diet. However she still needs calories to maintain (or hopefully gain) weight. I set out on an epic internet search for something simple to help me provide mom with a diet that will keep her from getting ill. I did not expect that it would be a challenge to do so, but turns out I was wrong. What I hoping to find a website that would present me with different meals (like on a restaurant menu) that I could add to a weekly planner and then automatically generate a shopping list and allow me to print out the recipes. I did find quite of few such sites, but none of them allowed me to specify low-fat foods that weren’t geared towards losing weight. Lots of weight loss diet planners available, but that isn’t really what I was looking for. I tried out one site and selected three nights worth of dinners, printed the shopping list and the recipes and went shopping. It still did not meet my needs easily so I am going to have to switch gears and do more work than I was hoping. There is a site that is recommended by bloggers and other sites out there that I am going to use. The problem is that I have to scour the internet to find all the recipes I think mom might like and then work them into a weekly plan with a shopping list.
Friday night I made the first low-fat dish. Honey dijon chicken with baked balsamic and brown sugar tomatoes. I also added mashed potatoes to the meal. It actually turned out pretty good. The chicken was very tasty and while the tomatoes didn’t bake as well as they should have (stupid oven), they still tasted good. Tonight I am going to make tilapia and baked wedge potatoes into a low-fat version of fish and chips. Should be interesting. Last night we had company so we all went out to eat at a restaurant. Mom had salmon so I had to change tonight’s meal plan from salmon to tilapia.
My mother’s niece, Sherri, and her husband Don are down here for a couple of days to visit with mom. Sherri is a few years younger than my mother (my mother’s sisters were teenagers when my mother was born) and is the next family matriarch in line. A title that Sherri is not looking forward to, but we all have to be the oldest someday, if we are lucky enough to live that long. My mother has been looking forward to Sherri’s visit. My mother was a young child when Sherri was born and my mother thought of Sherri as her baby. Mom has always had a special connection with Sherri. The visit with Sherri is important for my mother. It will give her peace of mind and closure should she not get to see Sherri again and I think it is important for Sherri as well. Having Sherri here will also give my mother’s spirits a boost from the low we had with her hospital trip.
Mom was supposed to have a chemotherapy treatment last Wednesday, but she ended up being in the hospital, so it was rescheduled to this coming Wednesday. She has an appointment tomorrow (Monday) with the oncologist to discuss this latest hospital visit and how it will play into treatment. One of the doctor’s at the hospital said that as long as she isn’t in the hospital that she should continue with chemo, so hopefully the oncologist agrees with that assessment. Mom really wants to complete the next two treatments and have the PET scan done to see just how much it has helped. Hopefully that will give us an indication of how much time she might have left, which I know is a pretty impossible thing to predict with any certainty.
I realized today that it has been five days since my last blog post. In a way, no post is a good thing because that means there likely wasn’t anything meaningful to discuss. In another way it’s not good though because that leaves people unsure of what is going on. So I will make every effort to get back into the groove of writing daily, even if there isn’t much to say. There is another reason though for the lack of posting. One that is more difficult to discuss. Each day that passes I find myself thinking we are another day closer to the end. Those thoughts coupled with the everyday stress of caring for mom makes it difficult to write about what I am feeling. I really need to, for many reasons, face that head on and just write about things that I might not otherwise want to write about. For instance, what it is like to get into silly little arguments with someone who, after a few minutes, doesn’t even remember or care what we were arguing about. It is taxing mentally. I really need to get that stuff. So that is what I need to do, even if I don’t want to. Write about it.
Well it is about time to make dinner (and hope it turns out edible), so I will end this one for now.