Time takes it’s toll… April 10, 2007
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Well, mom’s cancer and my depression (and loneliness, boy do people drop out of sight when illness is in the picture) has really caught up with me. So, this will be short.
Laura had to go back into the hospital last Friday (so much for Good Friday) because her blood clot in her leg isn’t going down…maybe even got worst. She spent the weekend in the hopsital (where we argued by phone constantly), and then she got transferred to a different nursing facility. The other one was giving inadequite care. All we seem to do anymore is argue. I know it’s because I’m the only one she has to fight with, but it really hurts.
I don’t know how to deal with any of this. What if she stays in the nursing home for the rest of her life? She hates life and wishes she were dead, and I can’t blame her. But I don’t know how to deal with this by myself anymore. I feel this huge depression falling over me.
The fact that I have little family except for Uncle Clinton doesn’t help.
I heard from my friend. I don’t know what to make out of it. When I get him on the phone he’s chatty Cathy, inevitably, it’s a bad time for me, and we both say for me to try later, and I always seem to get his voice mail. Called him on Easter while I was at my friends house figuring I’d get his voice mail – and he answered. Scared the sh*t out of me. He did come right out and ask me how old I was. So, I lied. I would tell him eventually if things went anywhere…
And I’m so low, (how low are you?), I answered one of Pablo’s emails. I know. Big mistake. See what happens when I hit bottom?
Another day, more shit… February 20, 2007
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My sleep these days suck. Most fibromyalgia patients tend to be late starters – early for me is about 11. By then I can usually get my bones to start working. This is the first winter in several years that it’s been this bad. I was even dreaming in my sleep how badly my knees hurt. My sleep sucks – 2 sleeping pills and a cup of warm milk or not.
My last dream I was skip tracing in my dream with bad knees! I haven’t worked collections in over 13 years!!! Skip tracing I think I had a 95% find status, it was the collecting I sucked at, which is why I got out. Capitalistic fiends! So what if someone in the family had AIDS, or cancer, or they were about to lose their house – we were supposed to convince them to send us their last dime.
I’m tired, rundown. Can’t find my flipping check book. (Like everything else in the house) I wonder if I’ll be able to take care of Laura when she does come home. But this is where I want her to be. I just feel myself spiraling into this very dark depression, and I don’t know how to stop it. I am literally scared of not being able to come back up. Not even for air.
Everyone, including my therapist (you really didn’t think I didn’t have one, did you?) keeps repeating that I have to take care of my self, but that’s not so easy. I don’t actually have a bed, it wouldn’t fit anywhere with the hospital bed, so when Laura comes back I’m back to sleeping on my summer chaise lounge with a lot of blankets underneath it. As it is, sleeping in her hospital bed, I wake up at least 3 or 4 times a night. The puppy downstairs doesn’t help (“duh people, you have to take time to train him, you can’t just throw him outside”.). And my brain just keeps moving at a thousand miles a minute – what am I going to do? The social worker from the hospice company recommended that I choose and contact a funeral company for when the time comes. (“Yes, mom, we’re still going to try to do things, excuse me while I make plans for your funeral.”). I’ll have to go through her things, get my apartment livable – and what everyone keeps asking me – or in Linda’s case, keeps telling me – I need to make a life for myself in the future. Do I want to stay in New England? Do I want to move? Unfortunately, I have a fibromyalgia clinic a half hour away that is highly recommended, and RI has excellent social services. I try to take it one day at a time, one crisis at a time, but it all inevitably evolves into this huge over analyzed process.
On top of that, one of my mother’s bunnies (all rescues, all house rabbits, all litter box trained – or at least until all of this started) has an eye infection. It looks like he’ll lose his sight in that eye – he’ll do okay, he’s bonded with a female who takes care of him. It’s just that rabbits are VERY quick to go downhill. Very delicate creatures. The vets we usually take them to is in Wellsley, MA, about an hour and 30 minutes from here. I still don’t have my license. A friend took me last Fridays and will take me tomorrow for his recheck to a trusted local vet, but our vet in Wellsley graduated from Tufts with her specialty in rabbits. If something happened to this little guy (well, he weighs about 11lbs) I don’t think my mother could handle it. I don’t think I could handle it. The last time we had a bonded pair and we lost the white male, his “wife” passed away shortly after, basically from a broken heart.
A hesitant restart… February 19, 2007
Posted by thelastresort in Mom, cancer, depression.1 comment so far
It’s been an awful 10 days. First of all, I have only come close to being that violently ill one other time in college – with my brave roommate Maria by my side every step of the way. I don’t know if I could have done it. Bless her soul, she became one of my dearest friends, my maid of honor, and someone who still holds a very special place in my heart.
Still having some symptoms, so haven’t been able to visit mom in the hospice, and I miss her incredibly. She is extrememly depressed and can’t wait to come home. I’m worried that her friend Linda has filled her with all of these ideas of things she may be able to do if she “just eats right”. Um, Linda, that’s the problem with pancreatic cancer – you can barely eat and what’s eaten doesn’t stay in. Just once I would like to look at Linda and very calmy say “Linda, shut the $%&* up.”
I haven’t gotten anything done in the apartment. It literally looks like someone drove a steam shovel through it. The last straw was the day we got the hospital bed. They deliver and set up the hospital bed, but you need to remove the other bed. So between my mother’s CNA Thelma (who could pass for an Amazon woman), a volunteer, and myself we got the box spring wedged in the bedroom against a wall, and I had to – literally – just through heaps of stuff onto a table I have in my extra room so we could fit the mattress in there. There is stuff everywhere. There’s boxes of my stuff from the bedroom sitting in the kitchen. I can’t tell you the last time I vacuumed. It’s just so overwhelming. I pick up a box determined to go through it, and gee, item #1 goes in the cabinet now blocked by the table moved for the mattress to fit in. And from there it just goes down hill. I had thought of storing stuff in a storage rental unit, but got talked out of it by a semi-friend. Next time, I go with my gut. There’s no where to fold clothes, no where to put clothes away once I get them back from the laundromat, no where to start sorting things for junk, donation, etc. I get anxiety attacks just looking at the mess.
There’s just too much on my plate (like, when isn’t there?) And each item is just another way to avoid another item.
A friend wrote how odd it seems that life just seems to keep on going when you’re in the middle of a crisis and how surreal it seems. I watch the news, I look outside, and I talk to people and it does seems surreal. I come back into my world and realize once again that I’m falling apart, that I’m losing my mother. My bed seems so much more appealing. It’s not that I’m not thankful for all I do have, I look around at the pictures from Iraq, from the remnants of Katrina, from Darfur…damn it! …from those doing without in this country, the richest country in the world and I want to cry. But it doesn’t change the grief I’m going through. I just feel guiltier.
And the hole in my heart just gets bigger.
Brief Respite February 14, 2007
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Have been violently ill since Saturday. Mom staying, temporarily, I hope, at hospice home due to my inability to take care of her as well as fear of her catching whatever it is I have. House very lonely. Frightened of what is to come.
