Strange Time

When you're told someone in your family has 7-10 days to live, time takes on a new meaning. Everything quickly speeds up, fear and panic join together, and plans are quickly made. As the time ticks by, the tension mounts.

When that time has passed, everything slows down again.

It's now been more than 26 days since we were given the initial estimate of time.

It's an interesting sort of emotion - annoyed - but with the doctor - not with the person that has out-lived expectations.

What happens in the meantime is that your own life has essentially been on hold, and suddenly you've got to rejoin it.

The doctor says that her initial estimate was based on the rapid decline she had seen in the past month, now she says that decline has slowed down. Now ... she says that this could go on for weeks.

So I have returned home and back to work. Daily calls cover things like - how the night went and is there any change.

One of my friends asked if it was hard to talk about?

'No, when a nightmare scenario becomes your reality, you just seem to adapt'.

Strange, it feels like I've been here before.

Meanwhile, I'm now 25 weeks pregnant. I'm finally starting to look like I may be pregnant (in fact I was asked when I was due by a stranger for the first time last week). At my next appointment with my Ob (Thursday), I will be doing the glucose test to check for Gestational Diabetes.

Hiccup

My current thing is that life can be very messy.

Mr. S and I have had to come to NZ as things have not been going well with my father. We had already planned on making a trip and were booked to leave next Saturday. In 24 hours we had to change everything.

When my mother told the doctor that she had 3 children living overseas, she was asked 'if they wanted to see their father alive?'
'Yes'
'Well tell them to come within the next 7-10 days'.

So here we are.

Life is very messy and mostly does not go to plan. If it did, well our trip would next week would have been for a nice catch up.

We are grateful to have had this time - since we've been able to sit and have some nice chats with him since we got here. Other times we've just been sitting quietly and reading, and in fact that is not depressing, it is very peaceful.

We take every day as it comes, and even manage to have a laugh sometimes.

I find it hard to know whether to update with this kind of thing, but on the other hand I just don't like the idea of back-dating either.

More later.