The Swirling in my Brain

In December, my husband's paternal grandmother finally passed away. It was a blessing because she had been bedridden and vegetative for years. She made my husband the executor of the estate, even though her son was still alive. Her son was that bad. She would never have trusted him to follow her wishes. However, she had a relatively large estate and and there were many many things that needed to be done. The funeral needed to be planned. Appraisals needed to be done for all the belongings in the house. A new home had to be found for my husband's father (he was living in her basement). And I already had a lot on my plate. So as you can imagine this just added to the stress we were under.

Every night I would close my eyes and things would just swirl around me like a tornado. Everything felt out of control. My mother did not feel she had anyone to talk to about my father so she would call me, sometimes 3 times a day. It was to tell me the new horrible thing my father had done. While he couldn't walk consciously, for some reason in the middle of the night he would get up and take his pajamas off and pee all over the place and then not be able to get back to bed. He was a dead weight so if I couldn't help she'd have to call 911. One time he got stuck in the bathtub! I told her that she needed to quit telling me all these horrible things. I said I knew she needed to talk about them but couldn't she find someone else? I begged and begged her. She found someone from her church to talk to but still kept telling me what he was doing. She said she couldn't help it. The swirling in my head grew faster.

Adding to the stress our oldest daughter was a senior in highschool. Her school did not have a good college counseling program. The highest achievement they expected was to get into UGA. But she didn't want to go there. Since we got no guidance from the school I was constantly racking my brain trying to think of places she could apply. I wanted her to have that "aha" moment of walking on campus and knowing she had found the right school. I thought of App State in NC as a possibility and made an appointment to take her there Monday, December 8. We were pushing it time wise but her favorite school so far was Rhodes College in Memphis and it was very expensive.

The day before we were going to leave (that would be Sunday, December 7, 2007) I was taking a shower and felt a thickness in my left breast. It felt like it was about 2 inches long and about 1 inch wide. I knew it wasn't supposed to be there but I also knew it could be absolutely nothing. I almost laughed. With everything we were going through there was no way I could have cancer. This was surreal, though. I figured it was just more crap I had to deal with. Since my daughter and I were leaving very early Monday morning I had my husband call the gyn to make an appointment as soon as possible. I wasn't stupid. I knew that if something was found, catching it early meant a better chance of successful treatment. I was proud of myself for taking care of it and not putting it off.

So I didn't tell the kids. I tried not to think about it. We drove to App State and did not fall in love with it. I had an appointment with the gyn the next day, who felt it and said she wasn't sure what it was. I needed to get a mammogram and a sonogram. It was scheduled for later in the week. I had no idea what to expect. Would I know right away? I assumed I wouldn't because the people there weren't doctors. I was 42 so I had had one baseline mammogram. I didn't even remember how it worked.

The swirling in my head was at a fever pitch. I was trying very hard to be calm and I kept telling myself there was no way it could be anything. I was at such a low risk for breast cancer: no family members, I had gotten pregnant early, and I had nursed all my children at least 12 months each. I had done everything right. There was no need to worry. I went alone to my mammogram and was completely clueless. A sign on the wall said not to ask the technicians anything so I didn't. They did a mammogram and then a sonogram. Then I was told I needed to see a breast surgeon. The doctor could interpret the findings. Well okay, that made sense. I didn't get a rush rush feeling. I got an appointment with the doctor for next week and tried to put it out of my head. That was Thursday or Friday.

Early Sunday morning I woke up in a great amount of pain in my stomach. On a scale of 1 to 10 it was a 9. I kept trying to breathe through it. I hoped it was gas. But it wasn't getting any better. I finally had to wake up Elliott. The pain was becoming unbearable. I honestly couldn't believe it. My mind almost refused to comprehend what was happening. Hadn't we gone through enough? I had just found a  lump. Our middle child had failed French with no remorse. Everything was awful, and now this???
The pain was not getting any better so I had to go to the emergency room. I had gallbladder disease. I needed surgery. All I could think was you have GOT to be kidding me. I was given strong pain medicine and told to eat a very bland diet and they would schedule the surgery as soon as possible. By now it's the middle of December and I still had Christmas shopping to do. I did my best to hold it together but the swirling in my brain was so bad a hole in the earth was forming. I didn't want to fall in that hole. And I still had to go see the breast surgeon.

Down the rabbit hole

After Disney, things didn't change much. My father spiraled further down into dementia. He needed a wheelchair which made it even harder for him to get out of the house. My mother had to hire people (finally) to come to the house to help take care of him. At first it was a few times a week, but it gradually moved up to almost all the time, except at night. He needed help with everything--things you don't think of when something like this happens. He couldn't brush his teeth, or go to the bathroom, or hold a drink, or get dressed, or anything without help. Mom was getting very worn down. My brother and I tried to help but it was tough for us too. It was just awful.

Making things worse, we still had the bugs from hell infesting our house. They were so bad we had to spray Bengal spray in the basement before people came over so they wouldn't fly in people's faces. I learned to leave on one light overnight so they would be drawn to it and I could vacuum them up more easily.  Plumbers and exterminators kept coming out but to no avail. No one could figure out where they were coming from.

At this time our middle daughter started a course of medicine to clear up her skin. It was the summer before she started highschool and we wanted her to be able to start without having to worry about her skin. We knew it was a strong medicine, so strong in fact that even though she was only 14 she had to get a pregnancy test each month to prove she wasn't pregnant before getting her prescription filled. What we didn't know was that one of the rare side effects was a type of personality change. She had been a reader, spending hours and hours reading everything she could get her hands on. She didn''t particularly talk back to her dad or me. She was pleasant, smart, charming, friendly, enthusiastic about new experiences, and generally a joy to be around. All of that changed right before high school. She started talking back to us, yelling at everyone in the house, and slamming doors. At first we thought this was typical teenaged angst. Puberty. She seemed to hate us. We never even thought about the medicine.

Her grades were bad. This was a girl who had made almost all A's and was very very bright. She was quite capable of sailing through her freshman year with all A's. She had never even made a C before. Her grades started getting really bad. Like C's and D's bad. I went to the school to talk to her counselor and her teachers. What in the world was going on? Why was she doing so badly? The teachers at her school were not exactly caring. "IB is hard, she's making C's, she's fine" was the answer I got. There was no concern over the fact that she wasn't even close to living up to her potential. It was very frustrating. We had her tested for drugs without telling her. No one really thought that was it, but we didn't want to be the kind of parents that were oblivious. She was not on drugs.

I took her to a counselor. The counselor told her to pull up her grades so we wouldn't bug her. She said that if she got good grades she could get away with anything. Then she told our daughter that we were helicopter parents and we needed to let go. I'm good about seeing my faults but helicopter parenting was not one of them. Her entire personality had changed. Finally, the doctor that had prescribed the acne medicine noticed her personality change. He immediately took her off the medicine. That was around October/November. We saw some improvement, but then something else happened that took our attention away.