A little more than a week after that shitty diagnosis and it's been a roller coaster. They tell me she's got a terminal illness and I don't know where I went, but my head just spun. I think the first words i was able to speak were, "I just want to go with you." I know that's not what my mom wants to hear, but it's there. It's not like I feel like life isn't worth living without her, but it's going to be SO damn hard. I can say that, but the gravity of actually losing my mom is still lost on me. There's a barrier somewhere inside that won't let the truth actually sink into my core. I don't know.... this really really sucks. It's been hard to carry on with normal day to day stuff. Everything is so wrong inside of me that it seems cruel that the world just keeps spinning. Seattle has seen it's warmest and sunniest days so far this year and I just want it to rain all the time.
Thursday, the night I got the news, I stayed over at the moms to avoid myself for a while. I slept terribly and stayed home from work on Friday. Friday morning was as normal as can be expected. Watched Netflix movies and just hung out with mom. She developed a pain in her lower right side that she assumed was gas and went to lay down. The pain got worse and became unbearable so she agreed to let us call an ambulance since the pain was too much for her to walk to the car. She was taken to the hospital and over the next few hours it was discovered that the pain was due to blood clots in BOTH lungs and some in her leg. FUCK! I took the doctors' lead and took this news with ease.
They seemed to be sure of their ability to treat her clots and get her out of the hospital. When the doctor came by and started talking about her treatment and how it would be affected by her ALS diagnosis the pity was palpable. The night nurse was super sweet and she pulled me aside and expressed her deepest sympathies about the turn of events and the ALS curse we've been strapped with. It was nice of her, but the sympathy just makes me feel hopeless about things.
I've mostly resisted the impulse to go on a Google rampage and read everything available about this shitty disease. I don't want to see it in black and white. I don't want to read about how my mom is slowly going to lose control over her body. How she will end up paralyzed and mostly unable to speak. How there's absolutely no treatment to slow or stop progression. How the average number of years from diagnosis to death is 5. Five years is just not eno0ugh.
As scared as I am of losing my mom I am even more scared for her. I am terrified of the day she can no longer walk. I am terrified of watching her fall apart. She's always been so strong. So lively. So young. And now I've watched her go from vibrant 50 year old woman who looks great for her age to sickly, weak 50 year old woman who looks 70. In less than a year she's aged 20. ugh!
So, the doctors and nurses patched her right up and we were out of the hospital after only 2 nights. She has recovered amazingly fast and I am cautiously optimistic. If she is strong enough to recover from a double pulmonary embolism in record time then maybe she's not as far gone as we think.
The day after she was released she was in to get her full biopsy results. Her neurologist isn't entirely convinced it's ALS, but he is sure it's a neuro-muscular disease and none of those are good news. Fuck fuck fuck.
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