Rom Com

I have a tradition, when my father goes to his usual hospital: I donate blood to the blood bank. It's there, I usually have to wait three quarters of an hour while he is prodded/massaged/scanned/tested, so it's not a huge thing, just a habit. Every three months, I give blood. It's not the most agreable thing in the world, but it's hardly painful, and it strikes me as so laughably easy to help others in this way...Just lie down, hold out your arm, and then go eat cakes and drink from juice boxes.

Anyway I went this afternoon. Last time my blood pressure was too low, so they wouldn't let me donate, but this time I was fine, so I went in and just talked to the ladies in the donor's room while the nurse set me up. We were all people with this kind of routine apparently, people who go to the hospital twice or three times a week, who know all the nurses and doctors and who have what we think of as a secret hospital life.

It feels like limbo: the hospital is airport-loungy in atmosphere. Potted palm trees, people pushing carts or drips, people taking cigarette breaks outside.

The nurse came to bandage my arm and gave me a juice box. The nice neighbour I had been chatting to giggled when I asked her if she came here often:
"That sounds like a terrible pickup line. We should write a romantic comedy about people meeting at a hospital when they give blood."
"Or while donating organs."
"Or while waking up from an anesthetic."
"Groggy love"
"Yes, that sounds amazing."

We shared bits of our secret hospital lives.

It was nice.

Hospitals blow

My mother was dreading chemo.
I had forbidden her to read online forums, because I am WAY too used to the rather depressing state of mind they can elicite in you. She read them anyway, and everyday brought a new tale of woe from anonymous 36 on the WORST CANCER STORY website.

We didn't even know what kind of treatment she was going to undertake, and I already knew more about chemo side-effects than others, since I saw both my grandparents go through with it.

My mother called me up elated on Friday. The biopsy was OK, and the doctors saw that the tumor was unresponsive to chemo, so they are going to go with an operation and then radiotherapy. My mother told me gleefully that her tumor was just like her.
"UH?"
"Well, it doesn't want to do chemo."
"OK."
"Also it likes drastic measures."
"Right."
"This tumor is just like me."

My father had a really bad spell a few days ago and had to be hospitalized in intensive care again. I'm going to see the doctors today during my lunch break, but reports differ: some people tell me he's doing oK, others seem to think he is very weak. Tracheotomy is an option. Anyway, my mother was telling me about her operation, which is in two weeks, and will require a lot of after-care. A nurse will help me at home, but it will be a lot of cooking, hand-holding etc. I have planned to have family and friends help, but still.

My mother and I chat together, thinking about how it will work out. Then she thoughtfully says:
"I do hope your father won't get worse and worse while I'm recuperating post-op. Then what will you do?"

I still miss my sister a lot. It would be so much funnier to have her around, since she is funny funny .

I may start reading forums for people who hate hospitals.

Overloaded

I looked around the classroom. The teacher was still talking about the Millenium Goals to beat poverty. The students were scratching away on their note pads, or as it happens more often, compulsively checking their Facebook page on their Macbooks. I felt very, very far away.

That is the thing with so-called new technologies. You always want to be somewhere else, on another Firefox tab, texting someone new, escaping into another playlist.

This Saturday, I was running with the cross country team. We wanted to run 10 miles. So we did. We had to keep together. I realized how seldom I spend hours with people. Meetings between two work meetings, hurried lunches, drinks. Those take an hour. Running for miles means talking or listening to other people, no escape, unless you decide to run a bit faster and make everyone breathless.

Running means you have to focus. On the pain in your legs, the slight wheezing I get from asthma, so you never overreach yourself. This is also something I don't do enough of: the quiet assessment of my body's thresholds.

My mother sometimes talks about cancer being an opportunity to slow down and block out "the noise". This would be people ringing at home all the time. Yes, I am the human answering machine.

Have you noticed people always say "the noise"?

What's your noise?

The twisted road

I was finding it hard to write here. My computer got hauled off to undergo repairs. I'm trying to find a way to get my father in a retirement home, against his will pretty much, which does not make you feel like daughter of the year. I would look at my last entries: death, depression. It would make me say that as soon as I had something funny to write, I would do it. But I realize I have to make a habit of it. Because the strange turn of events making 2010/2011 a bad, bad time for my family has just continued impressing me with its motivational anger.

My mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. DISCLAIMER: It's breast cancer, the most easily taken care of cancer, she's in good hands, it seems that she is OK, it's going to be chemo and an operation and all that, but the doctors have so far been optimistic and kind.

I'm so scared of not being up to the challenge. I sometimes resent the fact my father is always at the hospital or sick. I look at him and think that I want to be alone, not talk to him and have to watch him so diminished. Now my mother is going to be weakened and exhausted and I'm afraid of resenting it in the same way.

Also I feel so guilty all the time. Guilty that I'm trying to put my father in a retirement home because it is hard to care for him, but also because I have so much work and a part of me can just forget. Yes, both my grandparents died in the last six months, my father is still in the hospital and my mother has cancer, but in the end, I think I could get into the mindspace that this is normal. After all, I'm used to being worried.

The worst part of all is thinking about my sister. J and I are incredibly close. We have our own lives, but when things go bad we immediately start working together.
J is in America, miles away, and has to "enjoy" her last college semester while scouting for jobs, knowing that everyone is sick at home...And yet I want to rely on her. I want her support too.

This to say that I have given up on writing when things go well at the moment. This place is a shelter for me, and I need to accept that life can go twisted and dark, and that it doesn't make my blog "boring".

So we all go down the twisted road. I hope I'm a good traveller.