Community Chat

[BlondeMoment_1]

I mentioned a few months ago that my mother had been recently been diagnosed with lung cancer that had branched out to some organs, bone and brain. She underwent radiation for her arm bone and lesions on her brain and had her upper arm bone replaced since it was so badly damaged from the tumor. Her arm is healing fairly well though she doesn’t exercise it nearly as much as the doctors want sine she’s scared and it’s painful, and the radiation has done a decent job shrinking the tumors in her arm and brain and no new ones have grown. However, she’s had two rounds of chemo in the past 2 months and we learned on Friday that it hasn’t been doing anything to help eradicate and/or shrink the tumors in her organs (it’s spread to the liver, adrenal glands and a few others), and has made no improvement on the cancer growing on her bones which is spreading rapidly (now several lesions on her neck, hip, and back).

To make things worse I had to take my dad to the ER last weekend where we discovered that he was having a mild heart attack and had to have two stents put in (one was clogged at 100% the other at 90%). Needless to say I am about to break with emotion, hurt, and frustration. It breaks my heart thinking that this is the last Christmas I may have with my mom. Every day I see her she looks weaker and more frail. She’s in constant pain, can’t move around too well and I know that she’s scared and depressed and close to giving up, especially since all we seem to be getting lately is bad news. And I keep telling my dad he has to lay low and take care of himself or he’s not going to do my mom any good but he doesn’t listen and feels that he needs to be her main caretaker instead of acting like a recovering heart condition patient. I just needed to vent. I can’t concentrate, I keep over eating from stress and have gained almost 10lbs in the last 3 months and keep breaking down crying at the most random moments. Lately I’ve even been lashing out at friends that ask what I want for xmas, what we’re doing for the holidays or complain and moan about their own problems that seem so trivial to what my parents and I are going to. We keep getting hit with bad news and I don’t know how much more I can take before I break.