i love and appreciate all of you who still remain here. things have been unbelievably hard right now. down below i am going to copy + paste a life update that i wrote in my notes app and uploaded on instagram for my real life friends + family to read.
(839 words 4,474 characters)
I have something important to talk about. I’ve gone over how to word this or even share this for so long because as many of you know, I’m not very active on social media as a whole. I love and appreciate all the friends I’ve made and those that care about me over my life, but I’ve always struggled feeling the urge to keep up with social media as easily as others do. Due to that, I just… don’t.
But I feel the need to break my silence and share some rather personal things that I’ve been dealing with quietly. I still don’t know how to talk about them properly, so I’ll just write the words out as I feel them. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer about two years ago and “beat” it into remission a little after. Soon after that, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. This came as a shock to my family and was difficult to accept after how hard she worked to beat her breast cancer.
Since her diagnosis, it’s been nothing but a cold slope downward. Her health began to decline and do only that. She was doing chemotherapy for many months. Recently, she’s been in the ER too many times to count for blood transfusions and testing. Her health continues to decline, and they have decided to stop giving her chemotherapy treatments altogether after a CT scan early this month revealed that her cancerous colon polyps were only getting larger and multiplying. Doctors deemed it not even of any worth to continue putting her through chemo.
My mother’s doctor allowed her to keep her last few treatments in an attempt to keep her as healthy as possible before my brother’s high school graduation next week (as of today, 5/29). She wants to be there for him, as she has been nothing but bedridden in the meantime. Sadly, once my brother’s graduation passes, my mother intends to forego any leftover treatments and retire into hospice care.
Doctors anticipate she will have an extreme and rapid health decline in the short span of one to two months. It’s not a lot of time, and my family has been struggling emotionally as well as with taking care of themselves in preparation for this. I have a complicated relationship with my mother, but this has been so hard—so heartbreaking. Talk of life insurances and inheritances is so morbid but necessary. It takes a toll on me and I can’t imagine the grief she feels waiting for her time to come while knowing it’s so close. It’s going to crash into us like a speeding car right into a brick wall, held back by duct tape and a dream alone.
At the same time, I recently got diagnosed with an auto immune disease back in February when I had slowly become more and more disabled with each day. I was out of work for that whole month so I could be in and out of the hospital while they tried to help me. I was in so much pain every moment of the day—struggling to lift myself out of bed, breathe, and unable to do things like pull socks up my feet or open my own bedroom door.
I was diagnosed with early onset rheumatoid arthritis. I had been dealing with symptoms of this for as long as I could remember, all the way back since middle school and possibly even further. This disease was causing my whole body to become inflamed and destroying my bone cartilage. As a result, I have severe osteopenia (osteoporosis) in my wrists and permanent damage that will forever limit my mobility. It was a huge blow to my mental health (on top of my physical health), but a huge relief to get treatment. I’ve been okay since, but dealing with that portion of my life this year so far was… a lot.
The reality of my situation is that my mother is going to die over the summer unless a miracle happens. She’s going to give up, and that’s okay. We just want her to be comfortable. I won’t be working during the summer because I just can’t. I opted out of summer work so I could stay home and help her before we got the terrible news, and now it seems that my new reason will be that I don’t know if I would be able to work given that she’s dying right in front of me. It’s been hard enough watching her health deteriorate from the chemotherapy and the cancer itself, I couldn’t see myself trying to go to work thinking about the inevitable.
So anyway… that’s my update. If you made it through all my words, thank you and I appreciate you. I’m too awkward when it comes to myself and my feelings. Not a lot of things bother me and I prefer to keep to myself usually. I even enjoy it, but this is something that I wanted everyone to know.
