Also, My Mother

I am fighting with Netflix. I realize it must look like I am blogging, but what I’m really doing is fighting with Netflix.

Also, my mother.

I’ve been fighting with my dead mother since Monday at about 8 am. That was the fifth poke to start the IV for my MS drugs. I have great veins you know. They don’t always last, but they are large and mostly straight and it’s easy to start a line in me. It hurt. I have massive bruises on my left arm, but more than that, it hurt. It was really painful. I was mad that my mother the OR nurse, who could have gotten a line in, wasn’t there.

I was mad on Tuesday when the other two women had their mother’s there. I was alone. Thankful for the friends who drove me,  but I wasn’t going home to a mum who was going to make me dinner or tuck me into bed. I was alone. I was sick and I hurt and I was upset and my mum wasn’t there. I needed someone to take care of me, and she wasn’t there.

I was angry on Thursday when I got the drug rash and drove my sick and itchy self to the neurologist who prescribed more steroids. I was angry I had to take the elevator up with a coughing toddler because I’d just spent 3 days destroying my immune system and his cough could put me in ICU. He’s just a kid with a cough and he’s 2. He’s not going to cover his mouth.

I was angry at the pharmacy when they informed me that my insurance would only cover the generic, which came in the smallest dosage, so I was going to have to swallow 16 pills at once, on an iffy stomach. If I wanted the non-generic, so I would only have to take 6 pills, that was going to be a thousand dollars. I started to cry.

In my arguments, as I get mad at my mum, she points out what she did for me.

My mother gave me grit. The grit that got me through the IV starts, the grit that got me through the bone pain, the grit that let me bill 20 hours last week, the grit that got me out of bed each morning so someone could put poison in my veins. It was the grit that got me to the doctor’s office for the steroids, the grit that made me swallow the pills.

“Do you want cookies and TV? Or do you want to know you can face each day as it comes? Do you want to be cosseted or do you want to survive? I gave you survival. I wasn’t so bad.”

In my saner (and less prednisone rage induced moments), I know that she’s right.

It’s just that those moments aren’t these moments. So I’m fighting with Netflix. And my mother.