Walking is hard

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This picture pretty much sums up what mom is looking like these days.  Her hair is starting to grow back and for the past week or so she has had trouble walking.

Mom’s last radiation treatment was today.  The spot on her scalp is healing nicely and looks so much better than it looked after they removed the tumor back in January.  I think radiation was the right course of treatment for this little problem.  I think surgery would have just left her more miserable and would have taken longer to heal.  Hopefully it won’t take too much longer for it to close up and be a thing of the past.

She also had a follow visit with the chemo oncologist.  He is a really nice guy and is so patient with mom, even if he is busy and sometimes we have to wait a long time for him to finally get in the room.  He is very compassionate and genuinely dislikes when his patients are having problems.  During the visit mom asked him how he would describe pain because every time a doctor asks her if she has pain she says no, just discomfort.  Of course they react to this in a puzzled manner because anyone else would say yes there is pain with her condition.  He used a very funny analogy, unfortunately mom’s mental acuity isn’t quite as good as it once was so his analogy was sort of lost on her.  In any case he asked if she remembers the pain from going through child birth and she said yes.  He then asked how many kids she had, to which she told him that she had 4 kids.  He said to her that even though she can remember the pain of child birth, she did it 4 times.  Isn’t that odd.  His point was that nature has a way of letting us quickly forget the intensity of pain and that if she could remember 4 or 5 months ago when she was in a lot of pain then she would have a perspective for her pain today.  Several months ago them increased her pain medication from vicodin alone to oxycontin with vicondin as maintenance.  If we were to take away those meds she would quickly realize that she indeed is in pain.

Anyway, the oncologist asked her how she has generally been feeling.  After talking with her, he did have some concern about this difficulty she is having walking and that she has been more tired, listless and sluggish lately.  It could just be the heat, which has been pretty uncomfortable since we do not have air conditioning in the house (and now the car), but he wants to get scans done in a couple weeks to see if there is anything going on, particularly in the brain.  Mom has been using a cane for the past week when getting around.  She is still staying active by going to the gym and we just a few minutes ago got home from a walk, so she is still trying to get around but you can tell that it has been more difficult for her lately.  It also means she is more dependent as she is scared right now to go somewhere by herself.  For a while there she was able to get around alone and go shopping or get out of the house by herself if she needed.

Her hair is funny.  Looks like a grey peach.  It won’t be long before she can ditch the wig.  I cannot tell if she is excited to have her own hair coming back in or not.  She doesn’t say much about it when I mention her fuzz.  Perhaps she actually likes having the wig, its pretty low maintenance and she can simply take it off at night.

There is another worry for me lately with mom.  She seems to be down more often than not these days.  Been that way for a month or so.  We have talked about it a couple times.  One of our first conversations about her mood I suggested that she go to the cancer group that meets at the oncologist office once a week.  She did not like that idea at all.  I suppose at 74 she is just going to be stubborn and we will just have to wait this out.  She has good moments, but in the quiet times at home she gets down.  A lot of that has to do with her condition and the side effects like the neuropathy and some of it has to do with her fears for her kids future.  A common theme when we talk is her asking if we are going to be okay when she is gone and how we are going to get on without her.  We probably have this conversation repeatedly because she can’t remember beans anymore.  I assure her that we will figure out a way to get by and that everything works out in the end.

Going through this battle with cancer or any other long term illness must be so draining.  Sometimes you can just see in her eyes that she is tired and isn’t sure if she can do it any more.  Of course there are the good days when we have a wonderful time doing something together like visiting the gorillas.  Those times gets her re-energized for a short period and help keep her going.