I haven't written in a long, long time. Radiation was, for the most part, uneventful. About a week and a half into the treatments, the burns started showing up, and my skin got pretty irritated. Like, weeping sores irritated, which always made me think about the victims of the Hiroshima bombing. I visited Hiroshima and the museum there with my Mori family while I was in Japan, and I remember seeing a photo of a person who had radiation burns - it looked like the person's skin was melting off.
My skin, of course, wasn't that bad, but it did hurt. I've never really stopped being tired, so I wasn't surprised to experience tiredness as one of the side effects.
The treatments themselves were very short - about 10 minutes, from getting into the radiation room to getting out. As the techs told me (over the intercom) to "hold your breath" and "breathe like normal," I tried to think of the radiation going into my body and killing off any rogue cancer cells.
The weird thing about the burns is that they got worse for a few days after treatments stopped. The doctor told me that it would take about 10 days for my skin to really get better, and he was right - yesterday, 10 days after my last treatment, was the first day I didn't wear some sort of a bandage or cover over my skin under my clothes. There's just one semi-weepy spot left, and it itches more than hurts.
I had my chemotherapy port removed today at my (FHN) surgeon's office. So today, I'm officially done with cancer treatment. I've got appointments scheduled with my medical oncologist in 3 months and my radiation oncologist in 6 months, and it seems like that will be the norm for a while - a doctor visit every three months. I can handle that.
As this blog is some weird hybrid of a diary, I feel like I should talk about the other huge development in my life - Mom died Dec. 5. I got a call from Tim just as I was getting home from work; Mom wasn't getting enough oxygen, so they had called the ambulance and taken her in to the hospital. The doctor started asking Tim questions about whether he wanted to sign a DNR and intubation. I was still having daily treatments, so after my treatment that day, I picked up Jen and we went down to Sterling. I wasn't sure that Mom would still be alive when we got there.
She was - wearing a mask that did her breathing (noisily) for her and covered her face. Tim, Mark and Linda were there, and the nurse was telling them all the details you get when you're hospitalized - information about meals, baths, etc.
When he had finished, he sent a doctor in, who went over everything again: Mom was not getting enough oxygen on her own, and would need to be intubated and put on a ventilator. Was that what we wanted? We talked about it - we all knew that Mom wouldn't want to be put on a machine, so we told the doctor to make her as comfortable as possible. He reiterated that he didn't expect her to live through the evening, and we understood.
The doctor prescribed morphine to help ease any anxiety that Mom may have been feeling - she hadn't communicated with us at all, and Tim said that she hadn't been communicative at all that day.
So we were all there - Tim, Mark, Linda, Jen, Jeff and me - when Mom died. I am glad that she got to choose the time, and I feel like she was ready.
The funeral was lovely, and sad, and as I suspect all funerals are, not enough to represent how much I and everyone will miss Mom. Her old friend Carolyn Icenogle came, and told me that her husband Jack has Alzheimer's, too. There were some familiar faces from Good Shepherd - the Brockmans, the Groharings, Arlene. I liked going back to the church for the luncheon - the curtains in the basement are the same, and the shuffleboard courts are still there. I sat in our old pew and looked up at the altar once again. Steve came in and pointed out one dark board in the ceiling above the altar - he laughed and said he looked at that board every Sunday. Mom and Dad were founding members of Good Shepherd - the cornerstone on the old part of the church reads 1965. I remember Mom quilting there with the Women's Society, and so many spaghetti suppers and youth group meetings and Sunday School classes - both as a student and later, as a teacher - in that church.
We'll have to go through the house and figure out what to do with all of the stuff, but that will wait for at least a little while. It's still difficult to grasp that Mom is gone, but if anyone deserves heaven, it is her.
At some point, I remember talking with her about whether our pets would go to heaven. Animals don't have souls, she said, but God knows that we love them and will need them to be with us. So I'm picturing Mom up in heaven with who knows how many animals we've had - Tootsie and Hershey and Spot and Curfew and Meezar and Indy and Anna and so many more.
