February 2009

I need an innocent looking title…

by frogpondsrock on February 28, 2009

A very innocent title as well as a misleading one because I am going to write about my son, David.

David occasionally reads my blog and I have promised that I would never write anything about him that would be embarrassing. But he is 14 and sometimes just being seen in public with his Mother is enough to make him die of embarrassment. So I really don’t have any clear guidlines at the moment as to what constitutes embarrassment, from one day to the next.

Most of the time David and I have an easy cameraderie, I enjoy my Son’s company and we can, and do, talk about everything and anything. But at the end of the day I am his Mother and not his best friend.

This household is a benign dictatorshop, not a democracy. Even though we mostly operate under the terms of a negotiated ceasefire, hostilities still do break out.

I sometimes get so caught up in the ongoing guerrilla warfare that is Mother v Son, teenager v old person, relationship/ power struggle that I tend to occasionally forget that his Grandmother’s cancer is dissolving my Son’s soul.

The hardest thing that I have ever had to do was tell David, six days before his 14th birthday that his Grandmother had lung cancer. He had come home from school on a high. He had a great day and was looking forward to his birthday party on the weekend. My heart broke into a zillion pieces as I watched the news register on his face. I watched as all the goodness of that day faded away, to be replaced by a cold terror of the future. I could see all this on David’s face in the few seconds before he punched the kitchen wall and stormed outside to scream his anguish into the night..

But life goes on. As much as we want it to stop. Life,goes on.

Here we are eight months down the track just trying to carry on as usual..

Last night we were talking about school, David has been offered a place in an eight week mentorship programme with Nick McKim, the leader of the Tasmanian Greens. We were discussing various ways they might spend their time together, when the topic of Mum’s cancer came up.

I wish that I could remember the exact words that David used to articulate his pain because they were so beautiful. My son has the soul of a poet.

Mum has been giving some of her stuff away. She gave David a cast iron camp oven that he really, really likes. Last night the camp oven was the focus of David’s grief. He feels that by accepting Mum’s gifts he is being ghoulish and also by accepting her gift he is acknowledging her eventual death. I think, that David thinks, that he can prevent Mum’s death purely by the strength of his denial. My son is in a world of pain at the moment and it is breaking my heart..

I want to soothe him and tell him that everything will be all right and that there is no reason to be afraid of the future but of course I can’t do that. So I am going to take him into town today and together we will buy a punching bag..

I think that punching bag will see alot of work in the future…

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I would like to get off now…

by frogpondsrock on February 25, 2009

in Family,Sadness

Yep, anytime that anyone wants to stop this rollercoaster ride that I am on, is good with me..

It is exactly eight months to the day that Mum told me that yes, the lump on her lung was definitely lung cancer.

Eight months of non-stop emotional upheaval.

Eight months of half written, unpublished posts like this one.

… On the 19th of June my mother rang me and told me that a chest xray had shown that she had a lump on her lung. We spoke on the phone for probably an hour and we talked that lump into nothing more threatening than a cyst.

On the 24th of June, I was at Veronica’s when Mum rang me and told me that she had lung cancer. Mum was sitting on the side of the road in her car trying to process the information. I had gone cold and I suddenly found it hard to breathe. I felt like being sick so I couldn’t even begin to imagine how Mum was feeling.

I had turned my back on Veronica so I didn’t have to look at her while I was talking to mum because I knew I would start to cry...

Eight months of pain and anger and frustration. And worry. Lots and lots of worry.

But there has also been hope and joy.

Hope, that the radiation treatment,coupled with alternate therapies could help.

Joy, when we discovered that the tumour had shrunk.

We had a period of time over the Christmas break where we were encased in a bubble of hope and positivity and the awful realities of lung cancer could be pushed away to the backs of our subconscious.

Then the nagging worry that things were worse than they seemed, surfaced as I watched Mum struggle for breath after only minor exertions, like walking to her garden shed, only ten flat metres away from her back door.

And finally the numb despair and disbelief when we discovered that the tumour had grown again and attached itself to one of the veins in Mum’s heart.

FUCKFUCKFUCKITYFUCKRATBRAINSHITFUCK.

Last thursday Mum and I went to yet another appointment with her oncologist and things aren’t quite as black as we were led to believe at the previous appointment at the hospital.. *phew*

Things are still pretty shitty but some treatment options are still available.Options like some more radiation and possibly chemotherapy, But the doctors really dont want to do anything now whilst mum is still quite well in herself.

As it stands at the moment Mum is taking Tiff’s favourite steroid ,prednisone to keep her airways open. A small dose of slow release morphine,combined with liquid iboprufren to help with the pain, other tablets for heart palpitations,codeine linctus cough medicine, an asthma puffer as required and a partridge in a pear tree thrown in for luck… try singing all that to the tune of the twelve days of christmas.. *gah..*

So here we are at the end of summer just taking things day by day. Lurching along from one appointment to the next. From scan to scan. Trying to cope as best we can. Now I am off to take some photographs of the sky..

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