Heavy Mental

Time marches on so quickly and yet more weeks dash by since my last post.

Much has happened, but in a nutshell, Mum's scan diagnosis revealed a small brain tumour, which is what has been causing the eyelid drooping. She has since had a week of radiotherapy to shrink down the tumour, but has been left very tired as a result.

In black and white this actually seems very, very simple. In practice, not so much. The weekend before the radiotherapy Mum had a tummy bug and phoned me early on the Saturday in a panic, just as I was heading out the door for something I'd had planned for a while. She wanted me to call round. By the time I got there, I was so worked up by thoughts that this was all something that the carers could have done, had they not been canceled that is, that I basically walked in the door and lost the plot. What also annoyed me greatly was the fact that Mum had put on a poorly voice and had said she was in bed. I arrived to find her sitting in the lounge, reading. I did apologise later for being cross when she felt poorly, to which Mum said she thought I should go to the doctors. She obviously thinks I am mentally disturbed and cannot comprehend that this constant state of emergency and need to be on-call all the time weighs on my brain like an anvil. It's enough to send anyone over the edge, particularly as there are so many alternatives. Commonsense for example.

As Mum has felt so washed out since the radiotherapy, we are now in the quagmire of trying to reinstate the carers back to three times a day. Mum is angered by the fact that this requires yet more assessments by social workers and so on, and doesn't seem to realise that all this is created by the fact that she stopped the visits in the first place. It seems that she refuses to see that her cancer means she would start feeling ill pretty quickly, but perhaps many do this when faced by such a crisis. Whatever the reason, the negativity, the criticisms and the multiple phone calls are not providing me with the best of circumstances to function effectively on a day to day basis. And I suppose it's only going to get worse.