Generations and Choppiness

I have only got a few minutes before I have to go to the hospital again. I started to go this morning, but ended up turning around and coming home because my brother called to tell me my mother was asleep and he was sitting in the lobby with his laptop and I thought that just possibly mowing my lawn took higher priority than sitting silently watching my mother sleep. This decision made me feel guilty, but on the other hand my lawn looks good.

That's the problem. I don't have time to focus on anything, do anything, because for the last ten days and now for the forseeable future, my days are choppily divided into segments: hospital, driving to & from the hospital, waiting for phone calls from the hospital, staring into space, reading bad 1948 novels and drinking too much. Even when I don't drink at all, like last night, when I took a night off from family & friends and sat at home and watched The Lost World, I still feel hungover by noon the next day, because there's no focus and somehow this is all making me so, so fucking tired.

I don't understand why this is wearing me out so much: it's not, after all, manual labor, except for the looking for a parking space part. But it is, nevertheless, and that also makes me feel guilty and lame, and I think about my mother, walking around for the last 8 months, age 78 with a softball sized tumour in her colon, and still generally accomplishing more than healthy forty something me. My mother's generation can't imagine taking a whole day to lie in bed and read: it's shameful. Yeah, it's shameful, but I do that all the time and now even that option is out. I have lists and lists and lists of things that need to be done, but somehow, going back and forth to the hospital takes up all my time.

Doctor notes: The cancer hasn't metastasized; the lymph is clear. This should be good news, and is, except that she's not getting better, she's getting weaker, her innards are steadfastly refusing to start moving again like they're supposed to after an operation, she won't do her breathing exercises and the doctor is now worried about pneumonia. The doctor, who did not attend charm school (although as my brother says, you should prefer the mean charmless surgeon to the delightful fun one, because the mean one is actually spending his time in the operating room and not somewhere honing his social skills) keeps telling us that our mother is very old and then he looks impatient. Yeah, she is old. She is also my mother, goddamnit.