Realizing it won’t get any better is hitting hard.
I (40f) have been caring for my mother (68) for most of my adult life. In the last 15 years, she’s had a myriad of major medical issues. She recently got a new cancer diagnosis - her third bout of lung cancer. The first two times, she did great. Treatment was ridiculously smooth, she didn’t have any side effects from the chemo, radiation, immunotherapy.
This time though, that isn’t going to happen. Realistically, it’s just going to get worse and the decline seems to be happening quickly. This coming week is a flurry of appointments for an MRI of her brain, PET scan, CT scan and a thoracentesis procedure for getting fluid off her lung. I feel once we get all of those results, we will get a timeline of what time she may have left.
She is physically weak. She has fallen a handful of times recently. Her cognition seems off. Her memory is slipping. She sleeps more than she is awake. She eats, but she’s slowly losing weight. Her emotions are all over the place. We argue a lot.
It’s just the two of us. My brother lives 6 hours away. No other family, not really any friends, no other support. I am preemptively exhausted and overwhelmingly saddened by the reality of this new baseline of “normal”. I dread a treatment regimen, selfishly because of how much more work it will mean for me. I’m not sure if she even wants to do treatment, and if I’m being honest, I don’t know if I want her to either.
Sorry for the rambling. I just needed to get it out because I don’t have any other outlet.