Failing Miserably

In the first post, I mentioned that I am writing this blog to get my feelings out in the open.  I have looked all over the internet (admittedly I'm not the best Googler in the world) but I can't find anything that addresses what adult children of parents who have cancer face....  Are we supposed to be strong and just suck it up, buttercup? Because if we are, I am failing miserably...

Mom has finished all of her chemotherapy (twelve sessions with two types of chemo) and radiation treatments (30 sessions over the course of three weeks).  She actually didn't have a lot of bad side effects from the chemo but the radiation therapy was really bad...  I've never seen my mother in so much pain.

All of the chemo is now out of her system and mom goes tomorrow for a PET scan to see what all of this treatment has done to the tumor...  Next Tuesday, she will meet with the Oncologist to get her results. We've been in a bit of a holding pattern for the past few weeks.  People ask me how my mom is doing and I go through the motions explaining that we're waiting for the chemo to get out of her system and then re-scan, etc...

When I try to talk to friends about how I feel, I can't get it out. I don't really have words to describe these feelings.

I will say I pray that the tumor is gone and my mom is cancer free and I will continue to pray every day that she remains cancer free for the rest of her life.

But here's the problem... I saw those statistics and I have read that this cancer almost always comes back... Even when (And I say when because I believe in my heart it will happen) the results come back and the tumor is gone, mom has to go get re-scanned every six week for an undetermined amount of time to make sure it doesn't come back...

I can tell you the last three week of waiting have left me an emotional wreck.  I don't know how I am going to do this every six weeks!?!  All of this anger and fear and raw emotion...  If someone were to say the wrong thing to me right now, I am liable to either blow up or crumble into a crying mess on the floor.

Sometimes, I wake myself up screaming uncontrollably at the top of my lungs in the middle of the night. I'm assuming from a fleeting subconscious thought of losing her. Other times I wake up with a wet pillow from crying in my sleep.

I need to try to figure out a way to release this anger and fear. I've always felt silly talking to shrinks in the past but I may end up having to give it another try... I'll keep surfing the web for pointers in the interim... That and staying busy.