If you thought April was rough...

...May's been no cake walk either. Most of you who know me in "real life" already know what's been up with me since my last blog post. But those of you just tuning in for the first time, or for my blogospheric friends out there, I have some news to share with you. On May 14, less than a month after her cancer diagnosis, my mom died in San Jose, California. She was 73 years old. This entry might come off as clinical or cold or glib; forgive me, but I'm not in a melancholy mood today, and I'm interested in staying that way. This isn't meant to be a cathartic entry for me (although one doesn't know the outcome until one goes ahead and writes); rather, I'd like simply to let everyone know what's been up, so that I can move on to more nuanced posts if I feel like it, or more trivial posts if I feel that way.

My mom was admitted to the hospital after her very first meeting with the oncologist. The cancer doc called in the bone doc, because he was very concerned about a mass that had spread to her left femur. The orthopedic surgeon and the oncologist agreed that surgery to implant a rod would be the best insurance for my mom's comfort in her last months of life. Her cancer had metastasized, spread to her bones, and she was terminal, but also in danger of shattering her leg. We all agreed it was the best course of action to get her the surgery, but she was terrified. The surgery itself went as planned, and she was healing up on morphine, by turns out of it and cranky. At one point, she told a nurse that she didn't like her voice, that it was grating to her, and then she turned to the other nurse and said, "I'll talk to you instead." Her orneriness was kind of a good sign, though. Unfortunately, the bed rest and immune system weakness led to pneumonia, the pain drugs further weakened her breathing, and on top of that, her chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, from the smoking, also depleted her ability to get enough oxygen into her blood and increased her carbon dioxide output. A particularly know-it-all-like respiratory therapist put it this way: "her lungs are not allowing her to exchange gases properly." He offered this pat description every time we asked him a different question about her condition. After days on a bipap machine, which forced air into her lungs, the fluid wasn't clearing out and her oxygen and carbon levels continued to plummet/spike respectively whenever the mask was taken off. She was verbally unresponsive at this point, basically just sleeping, occasionally grabbing at the mask to take it off. So C. and J. and I made the decision we knew Mom would want us to make. We decided to take her off the bipap machine and wait for her to die.

Imagine that: I'm feeling more emotional than I'd wanted to at the outset of writing this entry. I'll say one more thing. We held the memorial for Mom two days later, at the funeral home and cemetery where my father and my grandparents are interred, and where my cousin is buried. I enjoyed the ceremony, as much as it's possible to enjoy such a thing, and I think Mom would have enjoyed it, too. Several friends she'd known for thirty and forty and more years spoke, and some dear family friends played guitar. I hope she would have liked it. She was well-loved, my mom.

I'm writing this. Does that make it real?