It’s very early in the morning and I am awake…wide awake. Before I go back into the past to tell you about my mom and her sweet passing, I want to share something with you.
I got a call from my wonderful daughter night before last. She is always so upbeat and bubbling with happiness. She’s been that way all her life. People are drawn to her like flies. She’s the “Team Mom” of the high school football players and she knows everyone of them like they were her own.
So anyway, this little sparkler calls me up and with mirth in her voice goes into this long ramble about how she has something to tell me because it has leaked out to so many people on her dad’s side of the family and also her husbands, that it isn’t fair for me not to know. She was trying to keep it a secret but you know how that goes.
So I’m ready to hear some funny news and she says “Now mom…don’t freak out!” I assured her that I dont’ “Freak out” about things and she tells me she has a lump in her breast and she is going in for a procedure this coming Thursday (tomorrow). She quickly goes on to say that she is sure it is a cyst and nothing more than that. The reason she is so sure is because it is very round in shape and she has read that cancer is irregular and also she just feels that everything is O.K.
I tell her that I’ll go with that diagnosis of hers but that I want to go with her when she has the procedure done and she says O.K. I have tried not to give it much thought but rather have a “wait and see” attitude, but it has given me some pause in the last 30 hours or so.
I remember once when I found a rather large mass in my breast that I hadn’t felt before. It surprised me that it seemed to come up all of a sudden. I called my doctor and he told me to come in right away. I remember my thoughts as I drove to see him. I asked myself how I would feel if it turned out to be malignant cancer and it was the first time I really got a look at my belief system. I will never know if my answer to that question would have proven true in the face of a death sentence but my attitude that day was “I want to live for as long as I am supposed to be here but when I’m done…I’m ready to leave”.
Remember what I told you in an earlier post about what Danion Brinkley said about his “out of body” experience and the “Beings” he encountered? I really believe that and somewhere inside of me today, I feel sure that if my daughter leaves before me…I won’t be far behind. I’ll let you know what the outcome is in my next post.
Anyway, back to my mom and the nasty little cough.
So my sister and I took mom in to see wonderful Dr. Johnson at Kaiser Permanente to find out the results of the Xray they had taken of her chest. Remember he was the one that she advised to “stick some Vick’s in that nose”. He was so sad to tell her that the cancer had come back and it was like it had exploded in her lungs. He said it was everywhere. She wanted to know how long she had and he said “Not long”. This was in early September of ’98.
They signed her up for Hospice right away and she asked if she could have the same nurse that my dad had because the whole family had come to love her. They said they would put in that request and we got her for mom’s case worker. Just so I don’t have to keep saying “the hospice nurse”, I’m going to call her Mary. I need to give her an alias because she did recommend Marijuana for my dad and I think that isn’t cool for a Hospice nurse to do and I sure wouldn’t want to cause her any problems…Saint that she was.
I remember when she came for that first visit. My mother got right to the point (ever the practical one) and said “I want to know what to expect at the end”. Mary said “Well there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that Lung Cancer isn’t one of the painful cancers. The bad news is that the way you actually die is by drowning in your own fluids. You will know the end is near when you start coughing with a strangling feeling and can’t catch your breath”. She said “When that time comes, we recommend that the primary care giver (I raised my hand and said “that would be me”) put you to sleep with a pain pill and keep you asleep with liquid Morphine (my old friend from my dad’s death), while your body shuts down”. My mom said “Yep…that’s what I want”. She had all the information that she needed and she just got on with her soap operas and her “word seek” puzzles that she loved.
My mom always loved having a lap dog but hadn’t had one for about 30 year until my daughter got “Chiquita” and we were able to borrow her every day. My daughter Julie had driven all the way to LA to get this little dog that was going to be put to sleep because the “mother-in-law” that had come to live with the family didn’t like her and the feeling was mutual. It was Julie’s boss’s sisters dog. That’s how she heard about it. She just knew that dog was the one she had been looking for and she didn’t mind driving 12 hours round trip to get her.
Chiquita was a “Poo-wawa”, or that’s what we called the mix anyway. She was part Poodle and part Chiwawa (my computer is saying “that’s not right but we don’t know how to spell it either” but you know what I mean). She didn’t shed because she had hair…not fur. She wasn’t really an attractive dog. She was brown with curly hair and she sort of looked like a “chia-pet” gone bad…but we loved her anyway.
Until my mom came to live with me, Chiquita had to be home alone while everyone was at work. So now I would go over to Julie’s every morning (Julie lives about a mile from me as the crow flies) and pick her up. As soon as I would open the door to my house and put her down on the hardwood floor, she would try to run so fast to my mom, that it was hard to get traction. It was always such a sweet way to start my day.
I just looked at my word count and it says “1202” and according to my blog class that’s too long for a post but I have to tell you a funny story about Chiquita and my mom.
Remember I told you that my mom was a large woman, but to give you the right prospective, she was about 5’9 and weighed about 180. So she wasn’t obese but she was still a large woman. Anyway since she had such knee issues, it wasn’t real easy for her to walk around a lot and when she would go back into her room to her chair, she would turn around and just sort of flop back down into it. It was one of those big leather easy chair loungers.
Chiquita would always beat her back to the chair and hop up into it and jump out of the way just in the nick of time to keep from being squashed. I remarked to my mom that I was concerned that some day Chiquita wouldn’t make it out of the way in time and she said “Well she’ll be sorry won’t she?” Ever practical mom.
After mom died, I saw a “Far Side” cartoon by Larson where a large woman is tacking up a “Lost Dog” poster and the photo on the poster is a little poodle and you can see the little dog squashed in the crack of her butt? It was my fear put into a cartoon and my daughter Julie posted it in her kitchen and I laughed every time I saw it.
Well now my word count is 1432, so I really better close and just say thank you for reading. I appreciate it more than I can say and this story is…”To be continued”
Sharon
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