Exhaustion

This week has proven to be nothing less than difficult. Yesterday marks day 3 of chemo for M and she has stopped receiving the first medicine. She will remain on the other chemo treatment until next Tuesday. All week she has been spiking fevers close or almost to 105º and has sufficiently lost her appetite. The nurses and doctors suggest that she is right on track and that all of these side effects are normal. They have started giving her something to hopefully increase her appetite. 

I will be going there around noon to see her. I call her each morning at 830 am just to check on her and today she said that her doctor came in (I don't know whether today or last night) and asked that we get the family together to discuss a possible transplant from a donor. The probability of this being successful is 20% and M doesn't sound too thrilled about that. Hopefully I will learn more later. ***Neither of her two sisters nor brother are a match for marrow transplant, if they were the probability would increase significantly. She is also at the older end of her age bracket for a successful transplant; normally persons her age reject the marrow.*** 

My father has his last and final chemo treatment today. He will be able to go see my mother on Tuesday, when her chemo is ending and his is no longer toxic to her or anyone in the ward. I am not sure if I made this point clear earlier. He has been heartbroken this past week that he cannot see her. 

I believe that is all the information I have for now. It's hard to concentrate when you have a million thoughts running through your head. I apologize for previous and future times that I have neglected to return phone calls, e-mails, texts and invitations to various events. If I am not at the hospital or at work, I am usually home re-charging or trying to sleep. I hope that is understood to my friends at this time. The reason I started this blog is so that I can cohesively gather my thoughts and update anyone who wishes to read it. I do not want to bother anyone with my problems nor do I want to repeat the same information over and over again. I usually have to hear something once, tell an aunt or my father, then Rob, then my mother again, hear it again and once I get to friends and other family I am exhausted. I apologize for my exhaustion. I hope that once I am not so exhausted I can rely on those who understand to listen to me if I need to babble. Right now, I don't. 


“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.” 
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated