TheBanyanTree: The cycle of life

[PJMoney]

My sister-in-law Chezza is a lovely, lovely woman.  She puts up with my
brother, has raised four children (two of whom are autistic), remembers
everyone's birthdays, works nights packing supermarket shelves to help with
the family finances, laughs at other peoples' weaknesses, stupidities and
mendacity, can cook up a storm and now, because my mother's children are
either too busy with work or too far away, she has collected my mother from
the hospital where she had her colonoscopy, taken her to her consultation
with the surgeon who will do the partial colectomy and taken notes during
said consultation to ensure that my poor, widowed, 79 year old mother knows
what to do in the days prior to having her operation and what to expect as a
result of that procedure.

My mother has never had an operation before.  She is what is known as a
tough old girl who comes from good farming stock.  She did have polio as a
tiny tot way back in 1928 or 1929 and, for treatment, was strapped for
months into a wheel-like contraption.  I've seen a photo.  Maybe that was
supposed to stop a limb, or limbs, from withering.  If so, it worked.  The
only persistent evidence in her of that long ago bout with a potentially
crippling disease has been the occasional failure of one of her eyes to shut
completely when she is sleeping; a bit disturbing for onlookers to see if
she was snoozing on the lounge but causing her only the occasional sore, dry
eye.

After my father died in 1990 Mum coped with her misery by accepting every
invitation that came her way and receiving, gratefully, whatever bit of joy
came of the occasion.  She dealt with the very early morning waking by
listening to the radio until she either fell back to sleep or it was time to
get up.  She dug so hard in the garden that she tore a biceps tendon and
then found a way of getting dressed that didn't require her to lift both
arms over her head.  When, two years later, she developed temporal arteritis
she took her steroids and was glad not to have gone blind.  Two years after
that she got weaned off the steroids and was very glad to have managed that
successfully.  Until last year she kept on volunteering at the VIEW club and
served multiple times as President or Secretary.  She became a de facto
grandmother to the children of the Lebanese Christians next door and, when
their real grandmother visited, the two women, neither speaking the other's
language, still managed comfortable conversations of a sort.

And now my mother has been diagnosed - visually, if not histopathologically
- with bowel cancer.  Sometimes visual inspection is enough.  

The good news is that the cancer is in a place where it was unlikely to have
developed slowly and silently, for years, never producing obvious symptoms.
So maybe it hasn't been there for very long.  Maybe it hasn't spread here,
there and everywhere.  The surgeon will know soon enough once he sees the CT
scans.

For me, physically, my mother's cancer is not good news.  That means that I
have/had two parents who develop tumours of the bowel so I really can't
afford to keep putting off having my own next colonoscopy even if, having
done it once, I do find it extremely hard to tolerate the thought of
preparing for another such procedure.

For me, psychically, knowledge of my mother's cancer is a terrible thing.
Of course I know she has to die sometime.  Just not now, please God.  Let me
die first, with my world intact.  I'm such a selfish bitch.

Janice