I was reminded tonight just how tough mom has been through all this. She was near hysterical when I first called, ranting about nearly everything. I’m probably not the best person to talk to like that, because I try to reason with everything. When she ranted about the timing, how this is happening at a bad time in her life (she’s frustrated that she worked so hard at multiple jobs for her whole life, and she was only retired for about 2 years when this happened,) I pointed out that at least it didn’t happen while she was still working, which would have either forced her to continue to work during these treatments, or to retire early.

It’s true, of course. In fact, she knew a teacher who was going through chemo while she worked, and mom told me how hard it was on her. But when you’re upset and venting, you don’t want to be told these things, you want to vent.

She was angry about a lot of other things, and I explained all those things, too. I see myself doing this and I want to kick myself, but at the same time I don’t know what else to say. Finally she apologized for being angry, and I had to tell her to not apologize, that she’s perfectly justified in feeling the way she does. Logically, that’s diametrically opposed to all the explanations I gave her, but I know that logic doesn’t enter into it. She’s angry and she’s earned the right to be angry.

Then she told me to hold on and dropped the phone. When she came back she told me she’d vomited.

After that she seemed to be a little better. I walked her through taking the right meds for nausea. (She has so damn many, and I have to remember what they’re called because she’s too tired to go get her glasses, so she has trouble reading the labels.) I suggested she take a nap before a show she wants to see tonight, and promised I’d call before the show starts. And I planted the idea that maybe after her nap she might nibble on some crackers.

She’s frantic about Friday’s MRI, too. It’s going to be a closed MRI, 40 minutes the first time around, then a contrast injection, then another 20 minutes in the MRI chamber. And no one there knows how to use a port, so they want to know if she has any good veins to use to inject the contrast. Naturally, she was getting herself worked up about that, too, before she vomited.

And she’s got an eye infection. She won’t tell me how bad it is, but she promised she’d see a doctor tomorrow.

And here I am, more than a thousand miles away, completely unable to help.