Hearing “the disease has progressed” from your Mum’s oncologist, when he’s talking about the cancer in her blood, is no fun.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It makes for a pretty ordinary day.
Realising that the new treatment regime will mean cancellation of Mum’s one trip away with her friends for the year is an additional blow.
But reading up on all the risk factors and side effects of the latest medicine is almost too much to take.
However, I do find that you don’t appreciate the good days in life quite as much unless you mix it up with a few bad days along the way.
We have since heard excellent reports about the new treatment and Mum is feeling okay after each session in the chair.
Which is to say that she has already adjusted to a long list of side effects and learnt to manage their impact on her life.
Mum will still be able to squeeze in the Probus Christmas lunch between appointments, fulfil her gallery duty and meet her ladies auxiliary commitments.
But she won’t be able to catch the community bus at all again until at least next February, because it clashes with her hospital visits.
That pleasant day out was happily anticipated once in a while.
As well as taking a selection of medications in tablet form three times a day and drinking copious amounts of water, Mum spends about two and a half hours in the chair on a drip on Thursdays and Fridays each week, for three weeks in a row.
This is followed by a week off.
It is her new routine for a few months.
For Mum, this means lots of driving from Nhill to Horsham and overnight stays with us.
We love having Nanna here and it really makes me lift my game in the kitchen.
My girls can be sure of dessert on a night when Nanna has a sleepover because their Mummy is out to impress.
Actually, my Mum brought banana cupcakes last week and a Paris Breast this week, so we may be as bad as each other!
If Mum didn’t have this terminal illness, she wouldn’t be regularly chatting to her three Grosser granddaughters about life, and that would be missed.
Definitely a silver lining I think.