Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I'm getting asked a lot these days about how my mother is doing. It's never easy to answer, because she's dying. She's pretty comfortable for all that, all of her needs are being taken care of. She has hospice checking on her every time she needs anything. She's being made as comfortable as possible with modern medicine and care.  Most people end up saying, "That's so hard."  And the only thing I can really do is nod. There's something in my head that always says, "It's not hard the way you think it's hard." It doesn't detract from the fact that everything is pretty difficult right now. I've always hated my emotions. They're always pretty difficult for me to access, except when I have the opportunity to process them with someone else, extroverted emotional expression seems to be one of the few ways I can deal with them. Grief always eats all my energy.  When I first came home from San Diego after the Thanksgiving perio...

Tuesday was absolutely insane. We had two appointments for the radiation oncologist and then the lung cancer specialist.  And while we were talking with the lung cancer specialist, he heard that John and I were here from Colorado and were going to fly back, again, for the brain cancer specialist next week. He said, "I think I can find an opening for you with him. Let me go talk to him."  He talked with the brain cancer specialist, and lo and behold, we got the 1pm appointment we couldn't get through the regular channels, and while we decided to have lunch in the cafe in the cancer center, Kathy and John got texts about the new appointment.  This whole trip has been blessed with so many bits of luck. John and I got two of the last four seats on the non-stop that was most convenient for our flight in. This Friday's flight was half the price of all the other flights around this crazy travel holiday. Our room at our hotel was the very last room left at this Homewood Suite...

My mother took my hand, as we were going to leave tonight, and she very deliberately, gently, and slowly pressed a kiss on the back of my hand. And at the look on her face, I clasped her hand back just as gently, but firmly, and I kissed her on her forehead. She smiled and let me go.  Words are failing her. I find it ironic that the only way that I can process her now word-muddled existence is through my long practice with words.  On November 13th, my sister and father did a video doctor's check with my mother. Their GP was so alarmed at her inability to truly respond to their questions made their primary doctor tell them that they had to go to the ER. That there was something seriously wrong with her and they had to get her looked at as quickly as possible. The three of them spend two horrific days in the over crowded ER at UCSD, in order to get the CAT scans and MRI that showed a very large shadow in her brain.  This was while John and I were in Kauai. We heard the begi...

We started the day talking through what it was we wanted to do on our last day here. It was good to talk it all through and to figure out what it was we really wanted to get, do, or experience on our last full day here. We're going to have to leave first thing in the morning to catch our plane to Las Vegas, which should let us get on a plane to Denver. Hopefully there won't be another foot of snow delaying everything there... We had our breakfast out on our patio, the last of all the things we had bought to have for breakfasts.  Then, as usual, a hen came up to check us out while we were eating. We shooed her off, but a little later, another came to look through the glass at us while we were getting ready to go. All week, one of the hens has been coming up to the glass, watched us, and lain down on the welcome mat to watch us as she napped.  It's fascinating that the chickens like watching us as much as all the tourists love watching them. But I really wanted a picture of o...

Today did not start auspiciously. My guts were entirely unhappy with me and the whole situation. After breakfast, we went for a little walk, that was actually quite good.  It included going out onto a stone pier that was a great exercise in balance that echoed a lot of the strength work I've been doing for the last four years. So it felt really good. The only problem was that when we got back to the room, my gut was very insistent about any kind of movement being a mistake. Kaopectate, an over the counter medication that uses Bismuth to "regulate your digestive system" was something that I had when I was a kid. It comes in vanilla flavored, now, and John got me some from Longs Drug, and I dosed myself as soon as he got it, drank some water and hoped that... well "maybe it will work out." We dropped by Konohiki Seafoods, and bought their very simple bento boxes.  Mine had two inari along with a pickle maki and two pieces of fried ginger chicken. John's was pr...

I haven't been sleeping all that well since Tuesday. The election results affected me badly. Jet had a great description, "It's grief adjacent." It is grief about my expectations about the world, this nation, and people in general. Though, if you asked me on any particular day, I don't actually believe in the "general" concept of people at all. I also know that a lot of my back brain has been processing, taking things in, and it then runs through a lot of them at night, even on nights after really physical days like the bike ride. So lack of sleep, an aching body, and something was really affecting my digestive system. These are all things you probably don't get in travel blogs. The downtime realities of travel. It's just the beautiful surfaces. I am guilty of some of that on Facebook, as one only has so much time, so much bandwidth, and can only display so many pictures, so why not the ones that we want to remember?  Why not brighten someone els...