Living with lurking symptoms

Many of my posts lately on this blog have been about the similarities and differences between my parents’ healthcare experiences. Today, I’m noticing a similarity of sorts. Despite my dad suffering from a mental disease and my mom suffering from cancer, there’s the same black cloud when it comes to the appearance of dreaded symptoms.

Before Dad moved to the latter stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have good days and bad days. Sometimes, my mom would even tell me that it was a good week, or at least an uneventful one.

And that’s when you strive for when you are ill. Let’s keep things as boring as possible, right? Now Mom has a hernia and we have been told by the doctor that it could slip in and out at will, and Mom has no control over it. If it slips into the wrong place, it can make Mom sick and cause her severe pain.

So just like with Dad, there’s a black cloud hanging over the house, and I walk on eggshells, hoping and praying the hernia doesn’t act up so that Mom can avoid emergency surgery. With Dad, it was his mind that was totally unpredictable. The symptoms of ill health can rear their ugly head at any moment, and that’s a special kind of torture all of its own.