Hey everybody
I hesitated to post in here because I don't have cancer, and I can't consider myself a caregiver since I'm 1300 miles away as my mother is going through this....but I do find myself dealing with bucket loads of the emotional crap...so thought I would anyway. Hope that's okay.
I've posted parts of this in other places, but...the Readers Digest version...my mother has had Crohn's disease basically all of my life, and the first "she's going to die" scare came when I was 7. Obviously, she didn't die...and through a very many ups and downs and scares and hospitalizations and surgeries and such...she's still here as I approach the 50 year mark.
Last fall (almost a year ago now...wow) she started having pain, losing weight, lots of stuff that she's been through before and assumed it was the Crohn's. She put off going to the doctor and addressing it (as usual for her) and tried to tough it out. She did for months...but continued to lose weight.
When she came to see us in the spring she looked incredibly thin, felt horrible, couldn't eat, etc. She went home promising to go to the doctor, which she did. Many tests later....unsure what's going on...probably Crohn's...blah blah blah.
In late May a friend ran into her in the medical center hallway and basically said "screw your doctor, we're going to the ER." They did, and she was admitted from there.
Two weeks of hospitalization with IVs of potassium, antibiotics, transfusions, tube feeding, etc. to get her strong enough for surgery...we've been through this before about 6 or 7 years ago when she had the colostomy....then surgery.
She was in the hospital a week more, sent home...telling me she's fine.
Then, a panic phone call from my estranged sister followed (the next day) by a note in the mail (long, complicated story but that's my mother)....to tell me it's cancer and she's known since she was in the hospital and before the surgery.
No other information except that the oncologist says it's "pretty well advanced" and she has to have 6 months of chemo. She's doing that now, but she's also making plans like she's dying...and talks like this is the thing that's going to take her out.
I'm finding this incredibly hard for a whole variety of reasons that I can't even explain. She and I have had a very difficult relationship...she's a narcissist, and my childhood was full of the craziness that goes with that...and the damage that follows. As horrible as it sounds, part of me is hoping the chemo will cure her, and part of me is wishing it was just over with.
We talk a couple times a week. She's coming to visit, probably in October - her request for an extended one-on-one visit (traditionally she can tolerate a 3 day visit.....maybe 4). She's done her will. She wants me to accumulate all the funny pictures of her and my son (they've always been close) so she can make an album of just the two of them....for me to give him after she dies.
Her illness has also opened the door back up to communication with my sister....more difficult and painful even than communication with my mother. She is trying to pretend that we're loving sisters...and has the astounding ability to "forget" or whitewash the emotional and physical abuse she heaped on me for years...and what she did to my son (which ended contact between us).
I find myself crying at the drop of a hat...feeling emotional and exhausted and frustrated and angry and depressed and things I don't even have a word for....wanting closeness and support and then also wanting everyone to just leave me the hell alone. Meanwhile...life goes on, and I need to be an employee and a mother and a partner and make dinner and and and.....and function.
How do you all do it?