Living with a mother dying of cancer

It started about seven years ago, when my mother felt a lump in her armpit. Maybe even before then.

Of course, her being who she is, it wasn't until five years later until she told us, when she felt another lump on her right breast. She didn't tell us that, either. She is who she is, meaning, she considered pain more of a nuisance rather than anything else.

That's why when her arm started developing lymphedema, she still continued doing everyday things for a long time. It developed gradually, over the course of three years - where it has now become more than a nuisance, but earlier, when it became more and more of a cause for worry, she went to see a clinic in Baguio City, the head doctor of whom ordered an ultrasound and x-ray.

The doctor sat me and my mother down one appointment day and told us what it was. Metastatic breast cancer, maybe stage 3. My mother said she already knew what it was. My mother didn't cry. I don't remember if I did. I just remembered the racks and racks of medicines in the doctor's clinic, who also was of the alternative medicine persuasion. My mother tried some of the medicines from that rack, for maybe a year. She still has herbal supplements at present, but hard drugs are doing most of the work in the hospital, where she is now. She has long stopped going to the clinic. I remember going to the Baguio bus station twice a month to get her from the La Union bus to that Baguio clinic, where she would be put under a machine that lights up for two hours. She would get so tired after those sessions, and she would go back again, and again, and again, and her arm would be bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

She didn't want surgery. She was adamant about that.

When she finally stopped going to the clinic, she had chemotherapy at the hospital. She completed the entire round, and did not go back for radiotherapy. Her arm got bigger. They found another lump amidst her insides.

Fast forward to about a month ago, and she's still doing everyday things. She found a new hobby, rhinestone art. She has completed around eight large pieces of it, dooting the infuriatingly small stones onto the sticky paper with her left hand.

An uncompleted piece lay on a table in the downstairs of this house we're renting right next to my sister's, one of a large cat in a basket of eggs. It was a gift from her office friends on her birthday, which she celebrated last month. She is 79 years old.

Every morning, before she got admitted to the hospital two days ago, I would wake up to my sister serving her breakfast, or showing her something funny on her phone. Sometimes I hear my sister's hyena-like laugh as something funny went on, and go about my day and my turn looking after her. She would alternate between being in bed or in front of the table, dooting away. Sometimes I doot with her. It was a shame she couldn't go next door to her friends anymore - she can't walk or stand alone. So sometimes she and my sister, or I, would march around the house, saying, "Hep, hep, hep." She would be so tired after that. Time for a nap.

She would wake up numerous times in the day, and in the night, until she cannot sleep altogether.

I left her at the hospital sleeping today, sometimes involuntarily wincing, always favoring a sideways position with her right arm lying on the bed. She got her lungs drained of 1 liter of fluid this morning, and when she went out of the operating room, I looked at her, widened my eyes in an anime fashion and stuck out my tongue, and she did the same as the porters slid her bed back to her room.

This bitter beer I'm drinking right now might have the same bitterness as her pain killers, which got harder and harder for her to swallow until me or my sister had to crush them using two spoons. It's good she has IV versions of them now, and I still wait for my psychiatrist to reply to me regarding sleep medicines to make her rest throughout the night. Nighttime is my sister's watch, and she watches while my mother does not sleep.

I remember six days ago, when she just got her nighttime bath, and it was time to put on pants. I told her to raise her right leg, or her left, and she said, "Should I raise them all?" My sister, quick as a bullet, said, "If you want to." All of us cried laughing for 20 minutes. I put her pants on, my sister put her to bed, and took her to the hospital six days later.