Caring enough to remember
For those of you who know me, you know of my mother’s history of breast cancer. This last bout with it she has successfully beaten, however not without the scars and wounds that sometimes come with treatment.
My mother for the past few months has been suffering with a radiation wound that just would not heal. The wound is the size of a baseball, open nearly clear to the breastbone. Today she is in surgery to hopefully correct that problem. She’s having muscle and skin removed from her back and then grafted to her chest. . The hope is to have the “good skin” on the chest heal with the good skin from her back, as the skin underneath is too damaged from 2 go rounds with cancer treatment to heal properly.
If she survives this surgery, and yes I am faced with the possibility of phone calls this afternoon of the not so good kind, she will spend months of healing and doing physical therapy. She will have some limited mobility when it’s all said and done. If she survives this surgery and heals properly that is. If the healing doesn’t happen, well honestly I have no idea what will be next.
If you’ve cared enough to remember that my mom is fighting the good fight, thank you.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been increasingly stressed out. Between work and my parents (mainly the mother right now), I really do need a very large margarita, a cabana boy named Jose, and no less than 2 months of being a complete vegetable on a tropical Latin beach somewhere. As usual, everyone around me has their own dramas of some sort. Being the person I am, I try to assist my friends with their problems. However, in the past few weeks, when I’ve tried to come to them with my own fears and complications, I am told I don’t know what stress is, I don’t know what problems are, I have it easy compared to their lives right now. Well you know what? Fuck that. Every one has problems, everyone has stress, and you do not have the right to tell me my problems are less of a concern or importance than yours. I am tired of being drug into a my problems are bigger than your problems shitslinging match , I am tired of being outright ignored when I say in a conversation that I need some shoulder time. I’m just flat out tired, and I’m in a bad enough place right now to be too tired to deal with you the next time you come knocking.
And if you remembered enough to care that I am not as strong as I like to let on, thank you.
