For thirty two days now, I have been waking up with one vision in my head.
One word.
“Mum”.
A dawn dawning that life is starkly altered, everything is different.
And then I’ll forget, flowing into the chores of the day.
And then I’ll remember.
And it starts all over again.
“Is this really true…?”
On Tuesday 11th June this year, Dad called me while in a hotel in Toronto on a business trip.
I had just come off a long work conference call, and sat at a banal desk in the consistently clean plainness of a mid-range hotel.
You hear it said that you know it first in the voice, in the moments at the start of a phone call to deliver bad news.
And, so it was.
Dad’s vocal chords were hollowed out by what he had to share.
After a day of tests in hospital, a CT scan had shown a tumor in Mum’s caecum, the first part of the colon where the small and large intestine meet. I had to look up the word caecum. As Britannica guides, it receives undigested food material from the small intestine and is considered the first region of the large intestine.
The second wretch that Dad had to deliver was the observation of ‘spots’ on the liver, and small darkenings on the lungs. All euphemisms in the taxonomy of cancer, I feared.
Dad was exhausted.
He had spent a long long day between the Accident and Emergency unit of Letterkenny Hospital and the ward where Mum was being held for tests.
(Letterkenny is a beautiful town right in the heart of the top of Ireland – the Republic – some fifty minutes from where Mum and Dad live in County Donegal, the Republic of Ireland’s most northerly county that slithers up alongside Northern Ireland, in the UK).
That day, Mum and he were brought from the world of tests into the world of results.
And from results into analysis of dark clues that became news.
I imagined a doctor in a long white coat, the kind of long white coat none of us want to be facing.
And from news into the phone calls.
And from there, Dad said to me, on Tuesday 11 June on the phone…from there he would be settling into a chair for the night, at Mum’s side.
“Is this true”? has kept repeating in my head, for thirty two days.
We now know well that it is true. And, as diagnosis has turned to prognosis, the details have not lightened.
Mum is about to start chemotherapy, on Monday, to try and fight off the twenty lesions counted on her liver, the secondary metastasis.
There is some good news to share.
I speak to Mum most days and she delights in sharing how “fine” she feels.
She sounds that way in spirit, too. That leaves me confused with the reality, but reassured in Mum’s courage and acceptance. I hear a desire in her to shift now from the quaking news we have been getting to the reality of battle.
Mum’s texts are chirpy as ever, enquiring about our days and cheering or commenting on the news we share. Nothing is different there.
It has been wonderful for us all that brother Pete – Nursing Practitioner brother Pete to remind you – jumped on a plane pretty quickly to be in Donegal within 10 days of the news. He was there for the all-hands meeting of the different doctors in which we were shared the hard prognosis. We’ve kept each other updated despite the distance, with outright highlights being Keara’s “Daily Daisy” videos.
It’s been a very queasy few weeks.
I’ll write again to update not too far down the line, I hope, with stoic and fair news from the first rounds of Mum’s chemotherapy at Letterkenny Hospital.
