Mothers and Pain

Richard and I have been visiting my mother in her assisted living community where she decided to move to six months after my father died.

The closer I am to her, physically and emotionally, the shorter is the fuse that leads to my pain. Propinquity = pain.

I have always been her reservoir, the pool into which her more sinister emotions drain. I am also her mirror -- having to reflect back to her what an excellent mother she is. Without the reservoir and the mirror, she tends to crumble and become either immobilized by inertia or explosive with rage.

I understand these dynamics. I try to hover above them, even as I act the part of good daughter. That distance, between the self I play and the self I am, becomes the fire that ignites the fuse that leads to my pain.

She is in pain, herself. She is also at a time of life when she is losing control over what used to be her privileges -- driving, taking medication, smoking. So now she experiences everything as a control issue -- our encouraging her to drink more than 4 ounces of fluid a day, to get out of bed at least by 3:00pm, to not screech at service people who are not giving her what she wants when she wants it. Her pain has also become her instrument for coercing others into giving her some control back. She throws her pain on the receptionist's counter at the doctor's office to have her appointment bumped ahead of others who are waiting. Her pain invites her to sleep until noon and take three naps during the day. Her pain gets her all the medication she wants, which along with Ensure, is her main sustenance.

What I am writing about her may come across as harsh. I don't mean it to be. I mean it to be a pretty accurate representation. And I no longer feel harsh as I describe her in this way. I feel great sadness and compassion. I appreciate that she is who she is, that we have an umbilical connection, that I react as I do and then need some time to recover.

Luckily Richard was with me on this visit. He was my anchor point and at times my protector. Looking at him while holding her hand helped me appreciate that I have a love she has never known, and am very grateful for that.

Now, back home, Richard and I once again accompany each other. And once again, he offers me sweet, real empathy as I do what I do to get my pain level back down. It really does make things better. It allows me to leave her in her life and cherish that mine is very different, better - and that's OK.

In what situations does your partner serve as your anchor point?

Two Blog Carnivals To Check Out

One is called Patients for a Moment, and it contains patient posts on the interesting topic of Guilt. It's being hosted at Glass of Win.

The other is a collection of posts mainly from health care providers. This one is hosted by the FDAzilla blog.

Oases of Hope

I have a friend who is undergoing massive chemotherapy to treat her cancer. She is likely to be in the hospital for at least a month. Right now, after a week, she is nauseous, exhausted, losing weight, and sleeping or zoning out a lot. When she's present, she is remarkable in her ability to hold two seemingly parallel realities -- that this is a desperate treatment with low odds and that she is living now and hopes to keep on living. Her husband describes this quality as "grit."

He often drops by our house at 9:00pm or 10:00pm, after having spent all day by her side. We talk about many things -- sadness, loss, our kitchen renovation, current events. We also talk about hope.

For many people I have met, hope is a bi-polar condition. It's opposite is despair. Either one hopes that there will be recovery or one despairs that damage or death is more likely. Every word spoken by the health care team becomes an augury. Every increase or decrease in temperature, every food product consumed and kept down, every smile or sigh -- become a sign of hope or despair, of life or death.

Since the distance between the states of hope and despair is so vast, and the signals to switch from one to the other are so continuous, this form of polarity-thinking is exhausting.

What's needed are stepping stones, or intermediate resting places -- oases of hope. As Anne Frank wrote in her diary, "Where there's hope there is life." To that I would add: Hope is not only found; it is created.

We can create these oases of hope that break up the long haul of illness and provide us with sustenance along the way. To do so requires two things:

• Paying attention
  
• Focusing on the ways in which the small can be momentous.

My friend and her well partner can hope for one good day. They can hope she has a quiet night of restful sleep. They can hope that the pain meds or the anti-nausea meds will help. They can hope that the new day nurse will not only be expert but also intuitive. They can hope that she will be able to enjoy two scoops of ice cream. They can find joy in her pride in hearing about her son's first day at a new job. They can find strength in her insistence that the IV holder be positioned differently to give her easier access to the bathroom. They can appreciate her "grit" in insisting that he (her partner) stop bugging her about food and take better care of himself by allowing friends to do his laundry and cook for him.

My husband hoped for and got joy from my quiet snoring that indicated to him that sleep had finally freed me from pain. I found hope (and a role model) in walking my dog and observing the ways in which she set challenges for herself (like finding a chicken bone buried under two feet of accumulated snow), appreciated her moment of conquest, and then moved on to the next adventure.

What are your oases of hope?