I haven’t been posting as much, lately, and I really thank the people who have been following my “stuff” and have checked in. My routine now is pretty much this: go in for treatment, come right home unless there’s a blood test or appointment, have lunch, sit like a lump for several hours. Radiation fatigue is cumulative and I’m accumulating it. Even my brain goes on strike for a few hours. I don’t think the heat and humidity is helping a lot. Tomorrow is the last treatment, though, at least for now. I’m hoping to get my energy back at least to the rather unimpressive level it’s normally at. I’m no dynamo, but it should get better than this. Of course, a lot depends on how I take to whatever the maintenance program turns out to be. I’m hoping that whatever it is, I can work around it.

Originally they said it would be twenty treatments and now it’s reduced to eighteen. Other people who share the waiting room are congratulating me on getting through early. I find I’m not as excited as they are, although I’m happy to be done. For one thing, aside from the fatigue, it hasn’t been that bad. The whole staff is incredible in the way that they make each patient feel comfortable and cared for. The radiation itself doesn’t have any discomfort connected with it. Now that it’s over, though, I’m integrating the fact that it’s only radiation that’s over. The doctor kind of brought that home in the last examination. Of course, you go in for a follow up. I have an appointment for late next month. He casually said that they’d evaluate whether I’d need more radiation at that point. I’m thinking, “Whoa! I’ll be back at work by then. I have this life and these obligations. When my time-out is over, it’s over.” Only it’s not up to me anymore. The other thing he said that didn’t cheer me up was that it was good that they were able to keep it to eighteen sessions because that would make it less problematic if I ever had to have the Total Skin Electron Beam Therapy. OK, I knew that was something that was held in reserve, but in my mind it was no longer a consideration at all.

We’re a sorry lot right now. My daughter said she’s tired of being pregnant. She wishes the baby was ready to be born. It’s a normal enough way to feel in the last few weeks. The thing is, she’s in the first trimester. That’s the sleepy trimester, though, so it’s understandable. You always feel like a nap would be a great thing. My daughter is used to a high energy kind of life, running from one activity to another. Now, she’s got about an ounce worth of baby who’s using up the limited supply of oxygen in midsummer air and she’s got a good sized catalog to finish, her steady freelance work and her eleven year old daughter home from school. She’s used to being equal to it all and now she’s not. I know how she feels.

My mother’s transition remains the toughest, though. I see where this is going and it’s no place good. She’s bored, and eventually that might mean bored to death in the literal sense. For much of the last year my daughter took her places whenever she could. Now she can’t, at least not nearly as much. That’s not really a temporary situation. When the catalog is done and work slows down, there’ll just be a small window of time before there’s a baby. She still thinks of herself as having lots of friends. She doesn’t. She has two who are mobile and they’re in their eighties, just as she is. Most of the others have either moved away or moved into a stage of life where they can’t be responsible for a contemporary who needs assistance at every step. She doesn’t really realize that about her condition. She offers to come along to the doctor to help me and occasionally still floats the idea of driving, if only down to the store. She forgets that someone has to get her in and out of the seatbelt, open and close the car door and help her in and out of the car and the house as well. In her mind, she’s still able to breeze in and out. When we realized we had to insist she stop driving we envisioned putting aside some money for cabs, so she could still have some freedom. As it turns out, that’s out of the question. She needs too much physical help and has too little memory to be going anywhere on her own, even in a cab.

We tried a senior citizens’s group and she did try, but she really didn’t like it. I don’t think she has enough short term memory to make new friends. She can’t remember anything she’s told, so how’s she going to get acquainted with someone new? On the other hand, we checked out social model adult daycare and she’s not ready for that either. We haven’t got any answers and are just taking this a day at a time for the moment.

I know all this sounds like a lot of gloom. We’re really not gloomy. We’re going along pretty well. We’re just working on getting our minds around these ever-changing situations. I somehow thought that middle age would be a more settled time than youth. It isn’t, at least for us. I realize now that life is just one continuous transition.