Blindsided

Mum has breast cancer. I didn’t see this coming. Last month, she crested eight years in the nursing home. Her doctor says she’s lasted five years longer than the typical Alzheimer’s patient. And now, it seems it’ll be cancer that kills her, not the disease with which we’ve all made an uneasy truce.

All of a sudden, it turns out that I do have a history of breast cancer in my family. All those forms I’ve completed in the last four months made untrue just by reading an e-mail.

Of course, Mum can’t bear up to the rigours of surgery and treatment – or even testing – so Dad has decided to have the nurses simply manage her pain, rather than fight the disease. It’s the right thing to do. I only worry that, as she’s been such an uncomplaining patient all along, she somehow won’t communicate her pain effectively enough to be adequately freed from it.

And now I can’t imagine telling Dad my own situation. I’d intended to share the details with him, once surgery was scheduled, but now it seems cruel to add worry about his daughter to the burden of losing his wife. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.