Gently

I’ve been really obnoxious lately around bedtime.

I just want to go to sleep and there’s Olivia, giggling over everything, but most especially over her attempts are twerking or something else to do with her butt.

That kid…I swear.

But one recent night was different.

We went to be a little after nine. I unbraided her hair, she ‘toileted’ (that’s what she’s taken to calling the act of peeing in the toilet. I know.) then all the turtles and Bobby the penguin kissed her goodnight.

At that point, I told her I’d be back and I went about my own bedtime routine.

Ten minute or so later, I made my way back toward her bed so that Barbie could sing to her.

Barbie commented that she saw Olivia yawn.

I told Liv that she looked tired.

She asked, “Can you smell someone’s tired?”

I told her that you probably couldn’t smell it but that you can hear it in a person’s voice and you can see it in their face. You can also hear the yawns as well as see them.

She smiled tiredly at me.

After Barbie performed her usual repertoire, she kissed Olivia good night. The turtles kissed her gently and then she asked me if I would touch her face.

Odd request, but okay. I gently rubbed her forehead, cheeks, and scalp. Her eyes got heavy as she relaxed under my touch.

I scratched her back a little and went back to rubbing her face. She fell asleep before five minutes of gentle touching passed.

I think she needed a night of gentleness from me.

I know I needed it too.

Auntie Nell

My mom and her sisters all had their children very young; as in late (or in one case, early) teens.

As such, they didn’t seem old enough for us (me, my brothers and cousins) to bestow the titles of “Aunt” or “Uncle” upon my mom and her siblings.

So they were just Dianne, Grice, Janet, Evelyn, Nell, Keith, Debra, Lorry, Ronnie, Eleanor and Rodney.

But then we, the next generation, started having kids. Most of us waited until at least our mid-twenties if not early thirties to have kids, which made the Aunts and Uncles that much older.

So when I’d talk to my girls about my mom’s sisters, they became Auntie “Name”.

When I got home that Friday afternoon and told Tom that my mom’s sister Nell had died, Alyssa said with despair, “Oh! But she was my favorite.”

That’s not to say she’d have chosen one of the others to take Nell’s place even if she could. She was just saying she was going to miss our Auntie Nell.

And we do miss her. We miss her laugh, her ability to tell it like it is.

She was so honest, so real.

She was also the auntie that my girls saw the most because she, like us, lived fairly close to my mom, so it was easy for all of us to drop in for a visit.

I can’t count the number of times the girls and I would show up at my mom’s house and Nell would be there. Or we’d be there when she arrived. And it was (still is) a given that my mom would have tea ready for Nell, Cherry and Olivia.

For what it’s worth imma pass on the tea, thank you very much. Blech.

But yes, she was the favorite. She didn’t try to make anyone like her. She just let people be who they were. I think that’s what my girls love most about her. She didn’t pretend she was there to visit with me or them. She was there to see her sister. We were just part of the package. My girls are reserved (at least around most people, including family) unless they see you every single day, or at least several times a week. It’s just part of their personality.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I just…her death has hit me hard. We knew it was coming but kept hoping she’s bounce back. She had a hard life. The beginning was really hard.

I just hope…I pray she’s a peace. I pray that she and Amy are laughing and loving and watching over everyone.

Motivate Me

The last time I managed to go on a diet and lose substantial weight (60ish pounds in six months) was 2013.

I was motivated by not wanting to be the fat sister in my brother’s wedding pictures.

That didn’t actually motivate me back in 2003 before my own wedding, though. So yeah. Huh.

I don’t know what will motivate me this time. Obviously being fat-shamed by my doctors doesn’t do it.

My jeans being tight and making me uncomfortable doesn’t seem to make a difference.

Hating my body with the passion of a thousand suns isn’t motivating me.

Knowing that being overweight is bad for my health doesn’t seem to matter either.

I mean, come on, self! I don’t smoke because it’s bad for me. I don’t drink alcohol because it’s bad for me. I don’t do heroin because, yeah, SO BAD for me. I don’t vape, I don’t snort cocaine, I don’t go out in the sun without sunscreen because that’s all bad for me.

Yet, I’ll make frosting so that I can eat it from the spoon.

I’ll buy Most Stuf Oreos and eat the stuf.

I’ll eat a bag of mini York peppermint patties, the FAMILY size, for God’s sake, in two days.

What the hell is wrong with me? None of the above things are good for me. I can restrain myself from having wildly unsafe sex with strangers but I can’t stop cramming high calorie, nutrition deficient food into my fat face.

Why? What is going on in my brain that I can’t be satisfied with the salad I have for lunch each day? Why don’t cucumber slices fill the void in my stomach (brain!) the way a bag of Funyons does?

Obviously, I’m a mess. My relationship with food is so very messed up.

So what next? That’s what I need to figure out.

For what it’s worth, I can’t and don’t blame the cancer completely. I know I was a fatty before I got cancer. That’s part of why I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me. I mean, what if my fatness contributed to my cancer? One would think that would be motivation, right? Since my stupid cancer wasn’t fed by hormones, hello, something had to trigger it.

So if it was fatness, wouldn’t you think I’d be out there jogging every single freaking day and watching every morsel I put into my mouth, making sure it’s the highest of nutrition and lowest of calorie?

Yes, I’d think that too and look at us, we’re ALL WRONG.

Hello, self, get your shit together!

And this ends my little tantrum.

Fat

News Flash: I’m fat.

Shocker, right?

Yeah, I didn’t think so. Everyone who can see through their actual eyeballs knows I’m fat.

And yet, medical professionals seem to feel the need to TELL me that I’m fat. Then they suggest that I ‘talk to someone’ about my fatness. As in, perhaps I should speak with a nutritionist, a personal guide, if you will, who will help me figure out why I’m so fat.

Guess what? I know why I’m fat.

I eat too much. I don’t move enough. That’s it. That’s why I’m fat.

I know HOW to freaking lose weight and yet…I am not doing the things that would make me lose weight. I’m not stopping the shoving of food into my face.

I always feel so awful when I leave these appointments.

Dr. S and Dr. R both seem to think I can’t feel the tightness of my clothes, the pain in my joints, the weakness of my muscles. Guys, I KNOW. I really do.

I just…can’t seem to fix it.

It makes me feel so bad about myself. I leave these appointments near tears, feeling so low and so bad that I just want to go eat a package of Most Stuf Oreos. In an effort to save calories, though, I’ll just eat the stuf, chucking the actually cookies out the window of my car to poison the area wildlife.

Sigh.

Feeling bad about this makes me feel like I’m being a whiny ass baby. I mean, I’m here, right? I’m alive. I get to bitch at my husband and kids on a daily basis. I’m not dead, ashes in an urn on the mantel.

I’m also not suffering from debilitating pain as a result of my lymphedema. My scar doesn’t hurt all the time. My hair came back.

I have so much to be grateful for and here I am, bitching about a couple of doctors making me feel bad about my stupid weight.

Just stop eating junk, you idiot! Go for a walk, so something other than sit on your giant ass every single night watching American Housewife on Hulu.

Oh, if only it were that simple.

I know it actually IS that simple but actually doing that isn’t simple at all. Not for me.

And look at that, I managed to feel sorry for myself AGAIN.

Ugh!

80

My dad turned 80 years old in December.

Most days he’s a fairly spry 80 but other days, I often see just how old he’s gotten. He’s very thin, which means that when he gets sick, he goes from thin to frail in a matter of hours.

I’d been home from work for a couple of hours on a Monday evening when my sister called me. She asked me if I’d stopped to see Dad on my way home.

I was confused. “You mean in Metz?” I asked.

“No,” she said, very obviously exasperated. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“What message?”

“He’s in the hospital,” she explained. “I left a message on your phone.”

“A text or a voicemail?” I asked.

“I don’t leave voice mails,” she informed haughtily.

Okay then. Moving on.

“What hospital is he in and why is he there?”

She told me that he’d said his heart was racing and he’d fallen twice at her house (he lives there most of the time) so she’d called an ambulance and he was in the ICU at our local hospital.

Wow.

She went on to say that he’d be moved to a regular room the next morning.

So I didn’t go to the hospital that night. I went the next morning around 10:30. He was sound asleep so I left him a note saying I’d be back after work.

He was awake when I got there that afternoon at 4:30 or so.

But he was groggy and confused. He looked terrible. We’re a very white family but he was even paler than usual.

My brother and his boys showed up while I was there and we talked while my dad dozed.

I informed the nurse before I left that Tuesday that if my dad was released the next day, on Wednesday, that I would be the one to come pick him up. I gave her my cell and my work number, asking that they call me when they thought he’d be discharged.

But even though the nurse hadn’t called, my dad had, and so I went.

When I got to the hospital, he was still in his gown with IVs still attached. He was dozing.

He woke up when I walked into his room. He gave me an apologetic smile and said he’d been told they might want to do one more test before they let him go.

“Okay,” I said and put settled in. It was 2:50pm.

Around 3:30, the nurse came in and told me that Dad’s caseworker would be along soon to talk about at-home care.

At 4:15, my dad asked me to get his clothes out of the closet. I asked him why he wanted them, he said it was time for him to get dressed.

Huh. Well.

I got him his pants and told him that he couldn’t put his shirt on yet because he still had a couple of IVs in his arms.

At that point, the nurse came in and told him that she’d help him change into this clothes when it was closer to time to go home but that we’d probably still have at least a half hour wait.

The caseworker came in and we talked about his weakness and how he’d need a lot of help getting around. She suggested home health care. She gave me several pages of information for such things.

At around 4:40 the nurse came back and started helping my dad into his clothes. I looked away as one does when one’s elderly parent is wearing a hospital gown.

Finally, the nurse’s aide arrived with a wheelchair. I left to move the car around to the discharge door.

I was parked and waiting, car running so that my dad wouldn’t have to get into a cold car when the aide came out and told me that the echo tech had shown up and they really wanted to run that one more test. It would be at least another fifteen minutes. She was so sorry.

Eh, whatever. I moved my car back to the parking lot and watched the clock. I moved it back to the discharge door about fifteen minutes later and waited another five minutes and wait, here he comes!!!

The aide and a nurse helped my dad from the wheelchair to my car, where he slouched in the seat as if he couldn’t hold up his own head.

I think he might have been dreaming during these episodes of dosing because while we were sitting in the parking lot of the local CVS (we had to pick up a prescription, don’t you know? And of course it wasn’t ready when we got there, it’ll be another twenty minutes or so, ma’am.)

As we sat out there, my dad came in and out of his dose. At one point he asked me if I was going to get glasses.

Nope, I hadn’t said anything about glasses.

Then my brother called him. My dad struggled to put his phone on speaker so he could hear my brother talk.

When he was done talking, my dad asked, “So what did J say he and the boy were going to get at Wal*Mart?”

“Ummm, they didn’t say anything about Wal*Mart. They’re at karate.”

It was weird and worrying.

I’m hoping he just needed a good night’s sleep in his own bed (couch, as the case may be.)

The nurse said he’d had a lot of Tylenol with codeine over the past few days and that will make a person groggy.

I don’t know.

It’s hard to see your parent so fragile, as I’m sure everyone knows. Once upon a time, my dad was larger than life in my eyes.

I hate watching him fade and yet…I know how lucky I am to still have him here, pushing my boundaries, irritating me. He’s so hard to define and that’s okay too. He’s human, flawed, just like everyone else.

I’m trying to move forward with the attitude that every single moment I have with him his precious rather than watching the clock when he stops by at 9:15 and being annoyed by it.

Then I remind myself that I’m human too and VERY flawed.

Together, we’ll figure it all out.

Flooded

Hey, remember back when I didn’t post for weeks at a time?

Yeah, I didn’t have much to say or, rather, I was saying stuff but not posting it. And one day of not posting would stretch into a week and suddenly, I’d feel paralyzed by my lack of posting and blah blah blah.

I’d wonder if I should acknowledge my lack of posting or if I should just jump right back in there with posts, pretending I never paused in my posts.

What to do? What to do?

This last time, I just sat down at the computer, opened my email and started scheduling posts using things I’d written over the past few weeks.

Since you’re here reading, you can see that I didn’t bother to say anything about the pause in posts. I just jumped right in and it felt good.

It still feels good. Even if no one reads here much anymore, I still want to write.

I want to bitch about being tired, record my angst about cancer coming back, talk about how amazing (and sometimes, amazingly frustrating) my kids are.

Even if no one cares but me, I’m putting it out there, polluting cyber space, if you will.

Support

There’s something about talking to a fellow ‘survivor.’

Wait, let me back up.

I got a card in the mail a couple of weeks ago reminding me that my annual physical with my gynecologist is due.

I called the office to schedule the appointment.

The person who answered was a woman I’d met two years previously when I was going in for an appointment. Her hair was so cute, super short and curly. I was bald.

I complimented her hair that day and she said that it was post-chemo growth.

I was impressed with how adorable it was and shared that I hoped mine looked that good when it grew back it. *Spoiler* It never looked that cute.

She shared some of her story that day and I think I cried a little because she was so kind of me and she’d been through so much more than I had. She had a double mastectomy, 49 lymph nodes removed, stage 3 cancer…all that. I had it so much easier and yet there she was, comforting me. I felt like such an ingrate even though I knew she wouldn’t want that.

Anyway!

When I called for my appointment, this woman answered. And, because she’s awesome, she asked me how I was doing. I told her that according to my mammogram back in November, I’m doing well.

We talked for several minutes. She shared that her lymphedema is pretty bad, considering how many nodes she had removed.

Yikes. Poor kid.

But can I just tell you how good it felt to actually TALK to someone who’d been through something even similar to what I’ve been through?

I shared that I worry that every twinge, every single pain is a sign that the cancer is back. I told her that I worry about which doctor I’m supposed to ‘bother’ with my latest worries.

And she got it. She understood my worries, my fears, my stress because she’s right there too. She feels the same worries, fears and stress.

We shared opinions on the surgeon who did both of our surgeries (we like him and his staff very much) and how great it is to have a doctor who doesn’t make you feel like you’re bothering him even if you probably are (again, that’s me thinking that, no him and not her.)

This is probably just one more indication that I should find a support group beyond the one I recently joined on FB. FB is good for what it does but talking to someone directly, truly connecting on a personal level is important.

When I was going through treatments, I didn’t feel the need to connect. I suppose seeing doctors and nurses every single week, knowing we were actively fighting the cancer went a long way in settling my fears but these days…I’m not doing anything to actively fight cancer.

Not that we even know if there is cancer to fight. I mean, according to my surgeon, I was cancer-free after surgery back in September of 2017. The chemo and radiation were just precautions because my cancer was triple-negative. I can’t take medicines to keep it at bay.

I just have to pray and have faith that we did all we could to get rid of it and keep it from coming back.

But all the praying and faith in the world doesn’t actually keep the worries at bay.

So yeah, having others who understand, who get these fears, who have been there or who are there, maybe that’s what I need.

Sounds like a good step toward self-care in 2020, huh?