How to strengthen the intention to live?

I don’t know what to do anymore, my mom has been in the hospital since Monday. She came in for a simple vertebroplasty and was supposed to leave the next day. It has been 6 days and she is still not out, we learned that she needs to go through another more complicated operation and the worst is that I feel that things are getting out of hand, or out of my hands.

She feels relaxed to be in the hospital, she feels that she is not hurting or burdening any of us and thus is willingly to stay here. Before she refused to take pain killers, she used to take much less than the dosage the doctors prescribed for her and thus was in constant pain at home, now that she is here I feel like she has surrendered, she is not fighting anymore and it is killing me.

I cannot even talk her through it since my brothers are so over protective of her and want her to follow the doctor’s prescription by the letter. Yesterday she was under so much morphine that she was sleeping while talking to us and she could not remember if things happened in her dream or in real life, so I asked the nurses to decrease the morphine dosages. They agreed but the added a new medicine to it. I feel they are over medicating my mom and I cannot do anything about it!

We have stopped treating the real problem which is the tumor itself since the liver has been attacked and we cannot deal with it until we get the operation over and done with.

I feel so powerless, I have surrendered everything to God, whom I trust with the most important and precious thing in my life : my mom , but at the same time I need to be fighting, I need to know that she is fighting . I know that if she has a strong intention to live she will succeed in this battle and get out of it alive.

The goal of the process is to strengthen your intention to live--not necessarily to live for a certain numbers of years, but to live life fully in each moment.

If you take good care of the moment, the years will take care of themselves.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. - NIETZSCHE

ADL or Activities of Daily Living

I have never heard of the ADL before but my mom has been insisting for quite a while that she is so grateful for being independent in her “activities of daily living”, she constantly says how much she appreciates being able to do her routine everyday activities without needing any assistance.

ADL are the routine activities we do in daily life in order to perform self-care such as eating, bathing, dressing, toileting, transferring (walking) and continence. Health professionals refer to the ability to perform ADL as a measurement of the functional status of a person. No one wants to become dependent and to have those basic abilities taken away from them

I tend to take such things for granted but ironically enough it is only when I read about it that I understood what she meant.

I keep admiring how strong my mom is day after day

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. - SAMUEL SMILES

Quality vs. Quantity

Today we went to one of the beat oncologists there is in Europe, and I beleive that he has acheived this reputation due to all the great work he has acheived through these years. After he heard our version of the story, he said that the best thing to do would be to treat my mom's symptoms. This means to alleviate her pain and help her acheive a better quality of life. I totally agree with that, but to do solely this and sit and wait is just too crazy especially for mediterranean-blooded people like us. We are worriers, we are doers, and we need to be doing something or at least feel like we are doing something to combat this nightmare. Swiss people, may God bless their souls, are way too cold, too rational and too attached to their quality of life.
Anyhow, we walked out agreeing to start on some kind of chemo.
The crazy part is that all the research i make, all the doctors i see, keep on giving me the same useless options. I wonder if there exists somewhere out there, some secret treatement for the privilidged people who are the sons or wives of Saudi kings or are in the US government ....
It just cannot be this bad... anyhow i learned to expect the unexpected
Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. - W. J. BRYAN

A Dream Yet to Be Realized

If there is anything I have learned from this experience it is that prevention is key. They say: better late than never, I don’t know if that applies in my case, actually there are no rules that nature follows and in my story I am hoping that nature will take its own course and undo what it has done. At this point I still don’t know the end I only know the beginning, and it feels really absurd.

Every day that has passed since we discovered the presence of the tumor has been a very long day. It was on Friday, the 30^th of January, when the doctor called my mom to tell her that she had: a pancreatic cancer. He was very calm and so was she; it was as if he was announcing the beginning of a terrible tragedy. We didn’t have any details, even though we tried to, he refused to give us any more information claiming that it is not his field of specialty and that from now on her case would be passed to a cancer specialist. That first weekend was torture, the waiting, the discovery of the sickness, the research about it on the internet, the books we bought and the ones we got from the library…we were totally lost. We didn’t have enough information to fall apart nor to have hope to go on, waiting was nerve wrecking but then again it was our only option.

After receiving the files, the specialists (the surgeon) made it clear for us that the situation was very serious and had to be taken care of very quickly. Three options were available surgery (where she had her biggest chance to get rid of the tumor and thus live for 5 years or more), chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

That was long time ago today I know that there are more options, I know that surgery was never an option for my mom due to the high incidence of metastatic disease at diagnosis. Also the administration of chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment has failed so we are looking at non standard treatments and luckily we have found a few.

I keep reminding myself and my mom that the fight is hard but worth it.

Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives. - A. SACHS