Today is an exciting day (at least for me) in my mom’s ass-kicking of cancer. Today she will be getting the last chemo infusion of this particular chemo drug.
My mom has essentially 4 steps to go through with all of this. First was the mastectomy, and we all know she kicked ass at that! I’m still amazed how fast she recovered.
The second step was this first chemo drug. She got it 4 times over 2 months (one infusion every other week). She’s again kicking ass at this. While she’s gotten a bit achy and maybe has to rest a bit more than normal, she hasn’t gotten sick once! And she continues to win almost all of her tennis matches (and I know her tennis friends aren’t going easy on her).
In two weeks, she will be starting step 3. It’s another chemo drug. This time it will be every week for 3 months. This drug is supposed to be easier than the first one, but everyone reacts differently.
After all the chemo will be radiation.
It seems like a lot, but when you think about it, she’s finished half of the steps that she has to do. I think that is awesome!
I won’t be seeing my mom until she’s gone through several weeks of the new chemo. I’m planning on going home around Christmas (I have a couple of days off of work then) and it can’t come soon enough. I’m still feeling a bit guilty for being in LA living my life while my mom is going through all this. She’s got my dad there and she can go to San Francisco to see my brother (or he can drive down to my parents), but I’m here. I know that it’s what my mom wants me to do (she wants everyone to keep going on like everything is normal, which I think is helping her stay healthy through all of this). But I wish that December would get here sooner so I can be there and help out doing whatever my parents need me to do.
I honestly think that I’m always going to feel a little guilty that I didn’t drop everything to be there for my mom for these months (the entire length of treatment is supposed to be about 9 months), but I have to think back to when I had my hip surgery (not that I’m comparing cancer with my hip issues, but it’s all I’ve got in personal experience). While I did want my parents to come to LA when I had my surgery to help me come home from surgery and drive me around while I recovered, I was happy to be independent again when they left. And the main reason that I needed them there for a lot of things was that I lived alone and wasn’t dating anyone. So there was nobody to take care of me. My mom has my dad there, and since he’s a retired doctor, I think he’s a pretty great choice as a caretaker.
I’m excited to see my mom doing so well with everything that she’s taken on, and that makes some of the guilt go away. She doesn’t need me there because she isn’t allowing herself to be sick. She’s doing pretty much everything that she did before her diagnosis now and that’s the example that I should be living by.
