Killing me softly *

You get to a point where you think that’s it.

Your mum is diagnosed with cancer, the bottom drops out your world. They say they can treat her, and you think chemo, then she’s done, great. Then they say it’s two more years of blood tests and chemo tablets, and you think what’s two years in the grand scheme of things. Then you watch her get sick every Friday with the methotrexate, and look wan all day on Saturday. You watch her get sick and have crippling headaches every ten weeks for two long years. You go to the appointments, you await the news of the minimal residual disease tests. You know there’s a bone marrow biopsy in the pipeline, know what that entails.

Then for the last week she’s been moaning about a pain in her calf, ignoring the pain in her calf. You have to threaten to drag her to the doctors yourself if she doesn’t make her own appointment. She tells you you’re overreacting. You tell her you’re experienced. She goes. And it’s more waiting. The doctor agrees, she has enough risk factors to warrant a Doppler scan of her leg, looking for clots. Tomorrow. There’s always something coming tomorrow.

Will we ever be done, will we ever be out of the grip of this? The threat of this always hanging over our head. I have watched so many people relapse. I know too much. I know there’s a much smaller chance of relapse with her leukaemia than most. And that we’re incredibly lucky. And that we can’t live our lives waiting for something to to wrong.

I’d feel so much more reassured if she ever took any responsibility for her own health. But she’s been ignoring this for a week. I think it’s more likely to be nothing than to be an actual clot but my god, she dismissed her sore throat/ear infection for long enough and that turned out to be cancer. She was literally 48 hours from death. All she sees is that she’s fine. She has no idea what her cancer did to us.

Xx