my mother

my mother is driving me batty.  she’s had this bloody knee op, and now the pain has gone, she’s hobbling about in her splint, and abandoning her crutches.  i went to bed after my last night shift only to wake up to find a pair of my shoes had migrated upstairs.  i told her i hoped they had walked themselves because if she had walked them up there would be murder.

now she has no pain, she’s just bored and fed up.  she’s not sick, just a little incapacitated.  and she’s driving us, as well as herself, round the bend!  the next couple of months are going to be intolerable.  i swore when she had cancer that if she lived i’d appreciate her every day, but i very nearly finished her off myself the other day when i’d finished work, picked her up from physio, taken her to the shops, brought her home, put the shopping away, hung out the washing that i’d earlier put in the machine, and cooked tea, only to have her hound me about moving the sprinkler in the garden because it was the one thing she’d asked my sister to do and she couldn’t even do it right!

it feels like a constant round of hospital appointments for one thing after another.  she had her clinic appointment for haematology on monday, and is in the last 4 weeks of her maintenance treatment. so she’s had six months of iv chemo, then 48 weeks, or 8 cycles or oral maintenance chemo.  four weeks and she’s done. 4 weeks and she’s been two years in remission.  sometimes my patients see us in clinic and ask me the next time i see them if she’s ok, and i tell them that she’s great, that she had leukaemia and she’s better now.  you hear so many sad stories of people who don’t beat it, god knows i’ve written enough myself in here, but you rarely hear the positive stories of people overcoming illness.  my patients always say it’s lovely to hear a positive story.  we had a lady who was really struggling with losing her hair, so i whipped my phone out and showed her photos of my mum, before, during and after, to prove that it does grow back, and quickly too.  she said it made her feel so much better to actually see it.  i think our outpatient day ward is amazing in what it offers to patients, but the majority are having chemo, not finished it, so other patients see the beginning and middle of the story but never the end.

it’s unbelievable to think that this time two years ago she had had to cancel her flights home for my grandad’s 80th because she had her lasy cycle of iv chemo to finish.  and now it’s almost like it never happened.  i say almost, there are still the days when she looks a bit peaky, when she’s got a common cold and i’m gripped with fear that something terrible has happened to her.  i suppose that’s something that’ll stay with me for a long time, even though i know i’m silly.  even though i’m a haematology nurse and i know the symptoms of relapse.  the fear we felt when she was diagnosed is something that will stay with me forever.  the months of anxiety over chemo, and infections, and delayed discharges from hospital because of this that or the other.   it seems like it happened to another person.  it probably did, i definitely feel like i’ve changed completely from pre cancer to now.  that’s how we all look at it, before and after the cancer.

but whatever has happened and however we’ve got here, however broken bits of us may be, and whether they’ll ever be fixed, i will always be eternally grateful that she’s recovered.  i just need to remember that when i feel like i want to stab her in the eye with a pencil!

xx