Trying hard...

...not to cry.

Things are going pretty poorly with my mother right now. We had hoped she would come home from the hospital last week sometime. She's still there. She has a staph infection and a cyst on her liver. In the span of just over a week, she's gone from being in good spirits and ready to come home to barely being able to speak two words before running out of breath. She's had a very high fever all weekend, two liver biopsies since Friday, and has been hallucinating and disoriented. Her white blood cell count never had the chance to rebuild after the last round of chemo, so they've been giving her transfusions. It's still not enough to bring her count up to where she can fight the infection. They've pumped her full of antibiotics and that's just making her feel worse in other ways. Talking to her on the phone is painful. That just makes me feel selfish, since she's the one actually going through all of this. Last week she could at least make it through a couple of sentences before she ran out of breath and started mumbling.

I won't be able to get up to see her until Wednesday. We have a newsletter that needs to be mailed out of the bulk mailing center in Rochester, so my boss said that I could take it up there. Since it's technically for work, I won't have to shell out the $35 in gas that I usually would to go up to see her. I haven't been able to get up to see her nearly as much as I would like to. Normally, I can't go during the work day, and going in the evenings would mean taking C. with me. He doesn't need to see her in the condition she's in. Last time we were there, mom was hallucinating and saying strange things and it scared him a bit.

Everything feels so crazy right now. They got rid of the leukemia on the second round of chemo. I know that still means lots of maintenace chemotherapy and even then the chances aren't great. But she should be home right now. She shouldn't be more miserable now than she was going through two rounds of induction chemotherapy. She shouldn't be closing in on her 10th week in the hospital. She should be close to her family. She should be getting back into her daily routine. At this point we don't know if she'll make it through the month, or if she'll get to come home again. The antibiotics could kick in tomorrow, or they could never kick in. Hell, the doctors aren't even sure of where the infection is exactly in her body. I hate not knowing. I hate not being able to be there for her. I hate that she hasn't been coherent enough for me to tell her about the wedding. I hate having to wait until my kid is asleep to cry so that he doesn't get worried. I hate feeling selfish about crying.

I'm crying.