Possibly Repeating Myself

Already I'm getting the feeling like I'm rehashing some details. That's partially why there were no updates on Monday or Tuesday this week. Well, Tuesday. On Monday there were no updates because I flew back from the Island and by the time I got home I was absolutely wiped out. I slept for a bit in the afternoon, woke up then was back in bed before 10:00pm and slept until about 6:30 the next morning.

Now Sunday. Sunday there were no updates because stuff was happening.

Actually, stuff was happening on Saturday too, but I shared some of that already, which brings me back to the first point, I may be repeating myself. If I am, sorry, but I promise to do my best to bring something new to the table.

Okay, so on Friday we were in Halifax and met with Dr. Rendon who, among other things, gave Mom a large-ish prescription for some variant of Prednisone (I saw the exact name on the bottle the pharmacist gave us but I've lost it, not having a particularly good eye or memory for drug or chemical names) in response to my continued concerns for her utter lack of an appetite.

Perhaps I should take a step back and really put that into perspective for anyone who hadn't been around Mom in the last few months. I honestly wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it regularly with my own eyes. Most days since June her entire food consumption might consist of as much as half a slice of toast with (I'm guessing) half a teaspoon of peanut butter on it. Maybe as many as three cups of tea (black, nothing at all in it) and, if we're lucky, maybe half an orange or a pear. That's it. She was literally starving to death (still is, I guess) but if she tried to force herself to eat more than that she would throw it all up within a few minutes and we'd be at a net loss because then she couldn't eat anything.

I really don't think the doctors we talked to were quite getting that for a couple of reasons. First, Mom had been overweight by rather a lot for as long as I can remember. I know it wasn't her whole life, there's lots of photos of her when she was younger where she wasn't overweight, but I never remember a time when she didn't need to loose a bit of weight. So the first thing was that she had a lot of weight to loose. That doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, though, because all you had to do was look at her and you could see how weak and frail she had become and the skin just hanging off her bones could tell anyone looking that something was seriously wrong. That brings us to the second reason why I don't think the doctors were quite getting it, and it's a matter of personal shame for me. She's been not entirely honest with Monica all of the time and some of these not-quite-truths have spread to other doctors as well, I'm sure. The reason why it's a matter of personal shame for me was that I caught her in one of these discrepancies after we met Monica and while I held my tongue when she was in the room, I did bring it up again after it was just Mom, Christine and I. I didn't yell or flip out or anything, but my firm (and apparently not gentle enough) statements that she cannot lie to her doctors no matter what did make her cry. Let me tell you, I still feel ill over making my sick mother cry and that's going on three weeks ago now and I still believe I was doing the right thing. Doesn't make it any easier to face, though.

So, anyway, Saturday we got up, dropped off the prescription and went off to talk to my cousin (I hope to get back to that in a later post, too, but who knows if I will, it's worth talking about but I can't promise anything) while it was getting filled. When we got back the pharmacist read Mom and I all of the instructions and warnings and then did what I guess all pharmacists should do, she took a look at Mom, looked at the size and dosage of the prescription and asked what it was for. Mom told her it was because she wasn't eating (and I confess here that at this point I actually had to fight down an irrational instinct to hide this fact for reasons I can't explain) and the doctor was prescribing it for the purposes of stimulating her appetite. The pharmacist laughed and said that it should definitely do that for her but then made a suggestion that I could have kissed her for. She told Mom that she should also try drinking Boost meal replacement drinks. No surprise to me, Mom told her she couldn't drink them but the pharmacist persisted (I owe her a second kiss for that, I think) and said that while she was pregnant she lived for fifteen weeks on nothing but Boost drinks and that there were lots of varieties to try. Eventually the pharmacist convinced Mom to just try at least one of the juice boxes since she wasn't as set against them as the milk-based ones and we took the single box home with us.

I so wish I'd noticed the pharmacist's name, I want to send her a thank you note. Next time I'm on the Island I'm seriously going to make an effort to just drop by the pharmacy and see if she's there.

Anyway, we went home and Mom took the first of her Prednisone and I convinced her to try to drink some of the box while I ate my grease-burger take-out. I poured her box into a glass and went off to the kitchen to hunt for ketchup and when I came back she said "You know? I think I can drink that." I nearly cried right there it was such an incredible relief. I can't even explain it except that I had been slowly coming to the conclusion that I was going to watch my mother starve to death with a fridge full of food before the cancer could even get to her but then we found this thing which, while obviously not ideal, would probably keep that from happening until the steroids could maybe work their magic and bring her appetite back.

Okay, that was Saturday. Sunday was bad at first but it ended on such a high note that it's nearly washed all of the other details out. We got up and Mom was feeling kind of depressed again but she ate half of one of her home-made rolls for breakfast and drank some tea (plus the cocktail of pills, now with more corticosteroids!), which I'd come to accept as just a normal morning now. After breakfast we started in on cleaning out more of her old papers and photos and such, the plan was to focus entirely on clearing out as many of her plastic as possible before I left so she wouldn't have to do them alone or move them. When lunch rolled around she drank the other half of the Boost box I had poured for her on Saturday while I raided her freezer and then we decided to take a break and go out for a bit.

Well, actually, that's where things went kind of bad. "Went out" is sort of a euphemism for "went on a morbid goddamned scouting mission". She had asked if I knew where my uncle Paul was buried and I said no, I didn't know what part of the graveyard he was in and she said she'd like to go visit him and she'd show me. So we went because no way am I going to say no to her now. It was a beautiful day, weather-wise, (Hey! Look! Nice Day!) so I parked the car somewhere near and then walked over to where Paul and Mom's parents are buried. We talked for a bit and then she said she'd like to go visit her friend Rena as well, who is up in the new part of the graveyard. So we went back to the car and drove around to the other side of the graveyard and got out to go looking for Rena's tombstone.

It took us kind of a long time to find it and while we were she started talking about what kind she liked and what she thought about this or that one and the whole time it was getting worse and worse for me.

Let me skip back about twenty-five years or so here for a moment. I'd been thinking about Mr. Greenan all day and about one incident in particular that happened on a cold fall evening at his house. He was one of my catechism teachers and one evening our little group was discussing the role of the church as a family. I don't remember the direction his lesson took but I do remember he asked us to imagine what might happen if we didn't have our parents around anymore, who would take care of us. It wasn't intended to be frightening or upsetting and for the other three kids in the class it wasn't, but this idea completely destroyed my sense of reason. I broke down pretty dramatically and while I was recovering I remember one of my best friends from back then sounding pretty worried and asking Mr. Greenan what happened. He explained to her that since I didn't have any brothers and sisters, I probably felt like I'd be completely alone and it scared me. Maybe that was it, I wasn't much into analyzing my motivations back in those days, but whatever it was, that mental image I managed to summon up when I was ten-ish, the one of saying goodbye to my parents forever, was with me all day long.

Eventually we found Rena's grave and after a few minutes started back toward the car. That's when Mom told me she didn't think she'd be able to make it without resting and instead she asked if I'd mind if she just made it to the edge of a row and waited for me there while I went to get her.

I tell you, that was it. I utterly lost my shit at that point. I think I'd been holding it together pretty well until then but that was the point where I really got the message that my mom is dying and there's nothing I can do about it except stand by and watch. My throat closed up and I couldn't say anything so I nodded, and helped her walk to the end of the row then just stood there, hugged her and cried for a good five minutes. Not wailing and sobbing and anything like that, just quiet but I couldn't hide it from her, despite being most of a foot taller than her. After a while she said something like she was sorry it was ending like this and I said it wasn't ending like this, it was just a rough patch that we'd get through, but you know how it goes.

Anyway, I needed some time after that to get my house back in order so I suggested we swing by the Timmy's so I could get a coffee since I'd only had one the day before and if you know me, you know me having one coffee a day is recipe for me ending up beating some hapless bystander with an old boot at some point the next day. The Timmy's shares space with a Wendy's and while we were sitting there Mom was looking longingly up at the Wendy's menu and said something about how she used to love their baked potatoes with broccoli and cheese but now just the thought of trying to eat one turned her stomach.

We moved on after I finished my coffee and she finished her tea.

We went back home and wrapped up our work on the last of her plastic storage bins and then zipped through all of her old video and cassette tapes. Most of them were trash, some she decided to donate to charity and a few she's keeping that I'll want to get transferred to some digital format eventually. Then, completely out of the blue she said to me "whenever you're getting hungry again, I think I'd like a baked potato from Wendy's." Not even her simple statement the day before that she thought she could drink the Boost juice made me feel as good as I felt right then. She didn't just eat something because I was eating and I wanted her to eat, she really, honestly wanted some food.

So we went to Wendy's. She didn't enjoy it as much as she'd hoped, it didn't taste as good as she'd remembered but she said it was good and she ate more than 2/3 of the potato which nearly made me giddy with relief. Calorie juice is good but solid food? That's the holy grail right now as far as I'm concerned.

So she's eating again. Very little, but way more than she has for months. When I flew back on Monday morning she didn't get up to see me off (seriously, who would crawl out of bed at 4:00am if they didn't have to? that's just crazy) but I called her when I got back and it turns out she'd had another roll for breakfast and she'd drank another whole box of Boost at lunch and then had half a pear and some ice cream for dinner. And today when I called her and asked her how she was doing she started off with "oh, alright, not great" but then she told me that mostly it's because her hip hurts but that she's actually going out looking for food at meal times now, showing interest in what her friend Janet is having and she's even starting to snack a little bit. I'm sure she's still way under what a woman her age and activity level should have for a caloric intake for the day, but it's movement in the right direction and I'll take every little bit of hope I can find right now.