h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd started responding to paul's journal, but then realized I'd be hijacking it So I'll move the hijacking-part here (because part *could* actually be useful over there...) and then go on a bit more in the next post (want to get this posted so I can stick the link in paul's journal--which is at F69196?thread=8300778 ) Actually, I'll paste a bit more than the hijacking-part, because that bit's a footnote to some of the maybe-useful bit...

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When my mom was unable to swallow*, and had a feeding tube in the convalescent home, she would still get a dry mouth. They had these pre-moistened spongy-swab things (lemon-flavored, iirc) that she could use, but those likely wouldn't help with actual dehydration...






*She had brain cancer. Inoperable (third-hand description is that it was like tar oozing into the convolutions). Fast--9 months from nothing visible on the MRI investigating why she was having seizures to nice and big. 3 months later, she wouldn't leave the feeding tube in. We lost her a couple weeks after her 52nd birthday. In 10 days, she would've been 65.

March is a hard month for me (well, not the last few years, unless I get reminded...) My dad's birthday was March 3--he would've been 65 this year. We lost him to MS of the brain (yeah, likely there's an actual real name for that, but that's what I was told, as well as it being really rare for MS lesions to be in the brain--of *course* Dad got something really rare ) a couple of weeks before my wedding--Tom never got to really meet him. I mean, he met him in the sense that they were introduced, but Dad had pretty much no short-term memory at that point. He thought he'd been down here in Crescent City just a few days before. He'd been in the home for 2 years at that point, and had been down here for the last time about a year or so before that. He thought Tom (who at that point was working fast food, and hadn't worked any other industry) had a job related to making shoes, for some reason. Dad was 49.

I just realized that the boyfriend I had before moving down here worked in a shoe factory. His name was Tod. We broke up a couple years before I met Tom, but the shoe thing makes sense now, given the memory thing.

Mom's birthday was March 27. Mom and Dad were born the same year. I don't actually remember them being married--Mom was remarried a month before my 3rd birthday. Lost my stepdad (search conversations for "Daddy Bob" for more details--I haven't the strength right now to go into more right now--don't want to explain crying to the girls right now) March 19, 2004--h2g2ers that knew me then might remember. Lost Grandma about a year later. Mom actually got past March--April 19 for her--but as it was Good Friday that year... Don't know how I'd handle it if US Mother's Day was in March, like UK Mother's Day... Then again, it wouldn't be hanging over me for 2 months.

So, yeah, there's a very good reason I don't tend to say much in friends' journals when parent health issues/loss come up--in most cases, said friends are older than my parents managed to make it too, and those threads are *not* the place to point that out. And in the cases where my friends aren't older than my parents were, they're still older than I was when I'd lost my last parent, which is also inappropriate to mention in others' grieving threads. Because I refuse to make others' serious journals all about me-me-me (funny/surreal/going-to-drift-anyway ones are fair game), but *my* journal's different

Oh wow... I never realised you lost both your parents so early.

Medical science has kept my mother alive at least ten years longer than we ever expected. She needed a pace maker in her early 80s, and that was more than ten years ago. My father has only had one serious medical problem -- cancer of the bladder -- but he has managed fine without the organ in question. He looks and moves like someone twenty years younger than his actual age. I'm sure he's a very rare case, though.

I'd rather age like my father than my mother, but there's no telling which one I will take after. Medical science has kept *me* alive longer than I expected, too. I just take the pills for high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and keep my fingers crossed. My weight is a bit high, but as long as I'm not obese the doctor isn't going to complain.