Putting it all back in perspective

Sometimes life has a way of making up your mind for you. Like when you're on the fence, trying to decide if a long distance move would be a good idea. On the one hand, it would be great to get away from everything and everyone you've known for so long, just start all over. But then on the other hand, would it be a good idea, in case your family needed you all of a sudden? And what about your child's relationship with her grandparents and aunts and uncle, not to mention the friends who have become more like family than your own family sometimes? What to do, what to do....

And then the decision is made. Not by your own rationale, or the careful weighing of the options, but by the voice on the other end of the phone who, in casual conversation, tells you that the biopsy results were positive. Tentative and meek, like she was waiting for me to cry, or explode, or something. But I did what any good daughter would do, allowing the prolonged silence and heavy sigh to convey what my absent hug would otherwise provide. I'll be there, Mom. You just tell me when, what day, what time. We'll get through this.

And the wheels start spinning. What type, what stage? Any mets? What about a PET scan? The poor expert surgeon, whom we have yet to meet, doesn't know what he's getting himself into by taking on this case. See, I'm not just a daughter of a cancer patient now, who are already the worst when it comes to overbearing and nitpicky. I'm a nurse. So I know those words that most family members don't, and when you try to broadbrush us with highly technical terms, I'm going to be ready with some of my own.

I know what this thing can do. For the past five years, I've been on the other side of the devastation, watching lives morph into a melancholy existence spotted with hope and fear. I have a different take on life, bouncing between the ferverent struggle to save it in the ER and striving to make others comfortable at the end of the journey. Where does my mother fit in? Why are my opinions and comfortable understandings of the medical field suddenly tossed into chaos when it becomes personal?

And now, because this is the way I am, I will bottle it up and hide it away, because I have to be strong. For her. Because she has been there for me through everything. Because I have regrets, things I've never said, things I should never have said. Because I will never have done enough to deserve her love and strength and support. Because she is my mother.