Normally I would not wish for time to speed up, but I don’t do hot very well and summer just isn’t much fun for me. Now I realize that I live in southern california pretty close to the ocean so hot is relative. No it’s not 110 degrees in the shade like it is in some places, but it is above my comfort zone. To add to the misery, the a/c in the car has decided to quit working. This is a particular problem because we are in the car a couple of times a day. So we have the car in the shop today and hopefully they will be able to fix the a/c with little effort or cost.
Mom has been having radiation treatment for the cancer on her scalp. She has three more treatments for a total of 15. She is doing pretty good these days. She occasionally has bad days or moments that we work through, but for the most part things are looking good right now. There are a couple of issues we (well mostly her) are dealing with that have been a bit problematic. Mom is currently in this sort of limbo you see. Six months ago she was given a pretty gloomy prognosis, but today the prognosis is more unclear. She responded well to chemo and the radiosurgery, which has bought her time but no one can really say how much time. However she isn’t fully recovered and still has her little issues which make life.. well.. awkward.
Take for instance that she can get along pretty well on her own, but still doesn’t feel stable enough to be completely independent. The other day she scared herself when she was driving and had a difficult time telling if her foot was on the brake or the accelerator. So she is back to being apprehensive about driving herself somewhere. I can certainly understand that and I don’t mind driving her where she needs to go. The problem she had with her foot was this neuropathy (tingling) in her feet and hands. It is really driving her crazy. There seems to be little we can do about it. The constant tingling is degrading her quality of life and making life pretty miserable for her. I know what it is like to have your hand fall asleep, but I have a difficult time imagining what life would be like if that didn’t go away after a few minutes.
She is also feeling quite lonely. I really cannot spend as much time with her as she would like and that is been problematic lately. I feel bad doing my own thing and try to remember that she needs attention, but there is a limit to what I can do. I am certainly not dad and cannot replace him. She is missing him terribly. I really wish that she had enough friends to keep her company throughout the day, but that isn’t really possible either. She has been doing a lot of pacing and wandering looking for something to do. Unfortunately there isn’t much that she can do and the things she can do, she cannot do them for very long because she cannot concentrate on one thing for very long. Every now and then (mostly late at night) she has to take a Valium to calm down. We started working a jigsaw puzzle. It is something we can do together occasionally and she can work on it for a few minutes at a time when she can’t find something to do with herself.
Her mood and her inability to remember things has made for some interesting arguments lately. Most of the time it’s because we talked about something and then she forgot about it. She has also been doing this thing lately where she has a complete thought in her head but the words that come out are not complete so I have to figure out what she might be talking about. For instance, the other day the street was being repaved so we had to park my car in the driveway and left home before the roadwork began. I parked her car down the street where they weren’t working when we got home. After it was safe to drive on the road, she asked my brother to go get the car. She asked me for the keys. Well naturally her car goes in the driveway and my car goes on the street so I got up to move my car. This started a little argument because the other part of the story in her head that she didn’t mention was that she wanted to park her car on the curb in front of the house where my car normally sits. Frustrations would have been alleviated if I could have just figured out there was more to it than my brother getting her car. Another example was two days ago when she told me that she wasn’t feeling great and that she wasn’t going to cook dinner. In the past when she has said this, it meant a fend for yourself night. So that is what I assumed. Around dinner time she asked my brother and I what we were going to do for dinner and I said I wasn’t sure, but that I would figure something out when I got hungry. My brother basically said the same thing. A few minutes later I go into the kitchen and mom is cooking dinner. I asked her why she was cooking and she said that she was hungry and neither my brother or I would cook her dinner. Well I felt like an ass because she was not feeling good and still cooking dinner. I told her that if she wants me to cook then she just needs to tell me that. I have cooked plenty of meals and would gladly do it. She said that she thought she was pretty clear that someone else needed to do dinner. I tried to explain that she was pretty vague about what she was intending and I mistook her for saying it was a fend for yourself kind of night.
So we have had these sort of issues lately which has made things a bit rough. She is feeling like a burden and I am pleading with her to just tell me what she needs. If she wants to talk or play a game or just sit near someone, she just needs to speak up. I am used to being on my own and doing my own thing, so I don’t always thing to ask her if she wants to do something. I try to think up things for us to do, but I never know if she is feeling up to it so I tried to make her understand that she is the one that needs to be vocal about what she wants when she feels like doing something. I told her I would drop whatever I am doing.
Occasionally she has moments where she tells me that we would have been better off if her and dad has gone around the same time. Perhaps in some respects that is true, but it is certainly better to have her around. I can appreciate that she feels lost right now. That she is without her husband and cannot do many of the things she once could and that situation must be very difficult. I can understand her looking and her life right now and wondering if she is just merely existing or if she is living. That has to be a frustrating notion. So for now we make as many plans as we can so that there are things to look forward to and just hope that the rest of the time isn’t unbearably difficult.
Bottom line, her illness isn’t as bad as we once thought, but life isn’t as great as we had hoped either. Somewhere between those two worlds we have to find a way to get by.