Wednesday, May 21, 2003
yesterday my mom came for lunch, and when she got there she told me that she hadn't been in the city for a meeting, like she said, but to have a second CT scan at the hospital. the last time she was there, they found "a spot" on her lung.
spots with regular edges, apparently, are less likely to be malignant (at this point, one surmises that "spot" is a nice, rather dick-and-jane way of saying, "tumor"). what happens is more spiral CT scans and then . . . i don't know, but if it *grows* or changes, biopsies and further "action."
i think the thing that makes me cry the most is that whenever we talk now, she closes the conversation with a small sweet voice saying, "not to worry."
i am worried. i feel like a door to the void just opened up. i feel like i can do nothing normal, because it's always the The Thing I'm Doing While My Mom Has Cancer.
she doesn't, not necessarily. but she could. and even if it's not now, she might later. and whenever it happens, she'll be gone.
i told a friend once, about a year ago, that one of the reasons i had for not moving to the big city to be a real actor was that if i could somehow know that my mom and dad had, say, ten years of real mobility and youth left in them, moving away and cutting my presence with them short would be unthinkable. i'm not not going to new york, and the lung spot is not a death sentence, but i have no idea what it would be like to move away knowing that there was . . . finite time. i don't know what i'd do.
i had just been thinking in the last couple weeks about how loving someone for all your life is more like choosing a parent than i had expected. this person, who you sign on with for infinity . . . the only other relationship like that, at least in my world, is the one you have with the people who raised you. except the partner, you choose. now it seems like that even more. i think about the difference that having c. around makes, and . . . if there's a good thing in this, it's that. there's someone to help. i need some help.
i don't know what happens. i don't even know how to talk about it.
spots with regular edges, apparently, are less likely to be malignant (at this point, one surmises that "spot" is a nice, rather dick-and-jane way of saying, "tumor"). what happens is more spiral CT scans and then . . . i don't know, but if it *grows* or changes, biopsies and further "action."
i think the thing that makes me cry the most is that whenever we talk now, she closes the conversation with a small sweet voice saying, "not to worry."
i am worried. i feel like a door to the void just opened up. i feel like i can do nothing normal, because it's always the The Thing I'm Doing While My Mom Has Cancer.
she doesn't, not necessarily. but she could. and even if it's not now, she might later. and whenever it happens, she'll be gone.
i told a friend once, about a year ago, that one of the reasons i had for not moving to the big city to be a real actor was that if i could somehow know that my mom and dad had, say, ten years of real mobility and youth left in them, moving away and cutting my presence with them short would be unthinkable. i'm not not going to new york, and the lung spot is not a death sentence, but i have no idea what it would be like to move away knowing that there was . . . finite time. i don't know what i'd do.
i had just been thinking in the last couple weeks about how loving someone for all your life is more like choosing a parent than i had expected. this person, who you sign on with for infinity . . . the only other relationship like that, at least in my world, is the one you have with the people who raised you. except the partner, you choose. now it seems like that even more. i think about the difference that having c. around makes, and . . . if there's a good thing in this, it's that. there's someone to help. i need some help.
i don't know what happens. i don't even know how to talk about it.
