Motivated by the several friends this morning who asked about Mom, here's an update for everyone.
It's hard to say, really. She's at home, first of all. She's been in and out of the Emergency Room a few times the last 2 weeks, suffering from a muscle injury behind her right hip, and a few days later severe pain from the same spot. Early last week she had a bout with sudden dizziness which caused her to temporarily lose vision, and there was some swelling around her incision site.
The good news is that through all those ER visits, Mom came home after every one. More good news is that the dizziness/swelling visit required an MRI, which indicated that her tumor has not grown, and so the dizziness and swelling were not tumor related.
The bad news is that Mom is really restricted to her bed. The hip pain makes it impossible to sit up in a hip-weight bearing position. The dizziness makes it hard to sit up, period. When we went to a regularly-scheduled checkup on Wednesday, Mom took some heavy duty pain killers and bravely managed through 5 hours in a wheelchair...which she has paid for the last 3 days not moving from the bed.
So she's rather bored. We watch a lot of TV together, whatever we can find on the channels available on the (very cool) antennae that Dad hooked up. We take naps. We fold laundry, I do the big towels and shirts, she does everything hand towel size and smaller. We do the dishes, I wash and take her a container full of wet utensils, she dries them. We act out plays that Mary Claire writes, we read Mom her lines, she repeats them. We watch more TV.
We did have one breakthrough fun moment last week, when Mom and Mary Claire helped make a quiche from the bed. MC shredded an entire block of Swiss cheese, Mom tore up a whole bag of spinach. The sheets got spinach-green dots on them, which months ago would have been not allowed, but we don't have the same rules anymore. Mom unrolled a refrigerated pie crust over a deep dish pie plate. I filled it with said cheese and spinach, and added bacon, eggs and heavy cream (I love Paula Deen!) and about an hour later we had 2 delicious, nutritious, pies. We ate them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Yum and very fun for Mom and Mary Claire to do.
We are figuring out how to take our normal every day activities and adjust. What tasks can we do laying flat out on a bed? It's making my brain think in different ways, rather than doing it myself and tasking my girls to do some things, I'm figuring out what we can move over to the middle bedroom. I do worry that I'm oversimplifying what Mom can do. Or that I'm not letting her be in control of decisions she is perfectly able to make. It's a hard situation, actually.
To sum it up, when you ask how Mom's doing, she is doing fine, sorta. I guess we all are.
Mom's addition: We are trying the very best we can. Might not be the way some people do it, but...
