The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

First, the good-this cycle is almost over and that means we have waited the requisite 3 cycles since my D&C and are cleared for trying again! I am so excited and relieved and though I am fearful I cannot wait to start trying and get some hope back into my life. I am trying to give my fear to God and relax and accept that I will be a mother, one way or another, when the time is right. That is all I can do at this point, well, that and have lots of sex.

The bad was Sunday. MS and I went and took a walk to a park in our neighborhood so he could use the monkey bars to do pull ups and other manly exercises. Now even though it is a park with a playground meant for children and even though it was a nice sunny day I didn’t expect anyone to be there. There are hardly ever any kids there aside from the occasional surly teenager smoking or dropping the F-bomb every other word in their cell phone conversation, which does not really make me long for a child of my own.

But on Sunday there were kids. Three kids, three beautiful adorable blonde kids-a ten year old boy, a five year old girl and a three year old boy. They were being chased around by a cute woman who looked so young that I assumed she was their babysitter, until I heard her children calling her “Mommy!” over and over as they ran around playing tag. They were adorable. So happy, cute and energetic. I wanted them, I wanted to be her. I couldn’t believe this girl already had three while I was sitting there feeling much older than her with nothing to show for it. I sat and tried to ignore them as MS did his exercises but each gleeful scream of “Mommy!” made my heart ache. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying not to cry and MS consoled me with his usual “We’ll have kids someday.” And by trying to cheer me up by finding a dried crunchy leaf in the grass, picking it up and putting it on the sidewalk for me so I could step on it. He knows I love stepping on dried leaves. Silly but cute and sweet of him.

And the ugly. My poor mom’s arm. Don’t think I’m horrible for calling it ugly, she would say the same thing. Everything had been going very well with her chemotherapy and treatments. Her swollen arm, which had filled with lymph fluid due to a tumor blocking drainage, had finally started to shrink on its own, defying the doctor’s predictions that it would never improve. It only looked a tiny bit bigger than her svelte left arm, the difference only noticeable by comparison. They sent her to a lymphedema treatment office, where they wrapped and bandaged her arm to try to force the swelling down. She happened to have this done on one of the hottest days of the summer. It was sweltering and humid for Southern California, and my poor mom’s sensitive skin got incredibly itchy bound in the tight bandages. The pain and frustration of not being able to scratch kept her up all night but she endured it and ignored it and went all weekend with the bandage on. When she went back to have the doctor take a look, they found that under the bandage her skin had become so irritated and inflamed that her arm had swollen up again to its old giant size, and is now covered in a bright red scaly rash. Poor thing, she tried so hard to be good and leave the bandage on, which ended up making it worse. She’s now waiting to let her skin heal before trying the bandage and compression again.