When I started working for my grandmother, we (I) set some pretty strict rules.  The biggest of which was that I would not participate in any medical issues.  This was promptly discarded two weeks in when I had to remove a tick from her inner thigh.

EW.

But aside from parasite removal, I’ve held to this rule.  The thoughts behind it are 1) I’m not medically trained and 2) I’m only there two days out of the week.  If she needs help with daily things like eye drops and taking her blood sugar, she needs more help than I can offer.

I’m around to widen the gap between an independent apartment (albeit one with maid service and cafeteria privileges) and a fully assisted living facility (aka nursing home).  She wants to maintain her independence and her quality of life, so I am there to do things like help write checks for her bills, order perfume off the internet, handling her more personal shopping requests, research/discuss/aid in complicated matters such as taxes, the property in WI, etc.

The one thing I did not plan for or anticipate was how I would also become a big part of her social world.  Specifically, her dining entertainment.

My grandparents ate out 2 nights a week for as long as I can remember.  Now, not only does she not drive but she can’t see well enough to feel safe in just anyone’s vehicle.  She also hates to be far from her own bathroom and hates to break up lunch/dinner plans with friends to request a ride back early.

At first I felt awkward about how much we ate out.   It was definitely a job perk I hadn’t counted on.  Nor really appreciated since it was also around this time when I started trying to get healthy.

A few times I tried paying for the smaller meals.  And a few times I succeeded.  But it really bugged her.  Once I mentioned it to my mother and she was adamant I let Gma pay because she truly enjoyed being able to go out and treat me.

So I became deft at ordering salads and splitting desserts.  I would take a long walk in the afternoon while Gma napped and follow it up with some more aerobics while catching up on Glee and House.  Despite this weekly decadence, I managed to make progress.

Then the cancer came.

Here’s the thing.  When someone has little time left and they still have an appetite?  You encourage it.  Gma started having very specific restaurant requests and once there, very specific preferences.  I don’t think I will ever again sit down to a table where someone orders salmon Florentine with french fries.

The problem is that Gma is very much a social eater/drinker.  She’ll have a glass wine with dinner if you are.  She’ll have dessert if you do too.  (Gone also were the days of splitting desserts.  She wanted her own, damnit.)  She wouldn’t even enjoy her soup/salad if I didn’t have something as well.  This happened often since I’d order an entree salad and no soup.  Then she would stop after every fork/spoon-full to ask if I wanted some.

So, I began to eat more.  I ordered wine and dessert.  When and if I ordered an entree salad, I’d also order some vegetable side to come out when her soup/salad course arrived.

Throughout our journey with the cancer so far, Gma has had few physical manifestations that she is ill.  The cancer is already in her lymph system, so one side effect we were told of was the possibility of lymph fluid building up in her abdomen.  And that seemed to be happening, as her stomach grew and her pants grew tight.

But the oncologist didn’t hear fluid when she went for checkups.  Yet Gma kept patting her belly and talking about how it just seemed to be growing and growing.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

I’m not quite sure why I didn’t put 2+2 together myself.  I guess because in a way I wanted her to have some signs of sickness?  That sounds horrible, but it’s also what she wants.  It drives her bat shit crazy that she’s been given this death sentence and doesn’t have a damn thing to show for it.

Finally, everything clicked (for me at least) when we saw her regular primary care doctor and she got on the scale.  She’d gained 8 pounds in three months.

I still did have to point out to her the connection.  I was leery to do so.  I didn’t want her to feel the need to stop her marvelous eating and enjoyment.  But I finally had to speak up the next time we saw the oncologist to give an explanation for the large belly does not equal horrible lymph system run amok.

While I probably in part get my stockiness from my Gma, she’s a pretty petite lady these days.  She can stomach those 8 pounds as long as she’s also willing to shell out some money for new pants.

But I however, cannot afford them.  The pounds or the pants.  I don’t have cancer (that we know of) (yet).  My food and exercise choices are made in part to ward off the possibility.  So now I am back to no desserts and (for the time being) no wine.  Which means she is too.  At least with me.

Thank god she has cocktail hour three times a week with other residents of her community!

Oh yeah…cancer.

I swear to you and my family and random strangers in the grocery store that I am trying to not ride a roller coaster or fret about every little thing.  But since my Gma is a big part of my life and she has cancer, there are only so many places I can hide.

Last Friday more tests results revealed that the cancer has spread.  And further away from the tumor site than originally thought.

She has decided no chemo.  I’m very content with this in the fact that 1) chemo cannot cure this kind of cancer, just supress it; 2) Gma took a lot of time making this decision and it was very informed; and 3) she is still healthy enough and with-it enough to make the decision herself.

This week she wanted to buy more muumuus since bloating often occurs as the lymph nodes grow.  But she also felt she needed new makeup, so she has definitely is not just laying around waiting to die.  Unless she just wanted to make sure she has a pretty face when she goes.  I didn’t ask.

Grandma and I could not really be more different.  And yeah, that’s a pretty easy statement to make when you span two generations.  But personality-wise, I very much take after my mother.  A que sera que sera state of mind where I am not too concerned about things I can’t control.

(Which is also why I’m such a damn perfectionist about my self.  Because I can control me.  Usually.)

I do not read weather reports.  I rarely check traffic conditions (except when I have complete control of when Iwill be on the road).  I’m fairly confident I will continue to breath, eat, and drink clean water no matter what scandal has rocked the government or my friends.

My grandmother on the other hand, tracks the weather report religiously.  Not just for here.  She’s been worried the past two weeks about the heat wave in Chicago.  She watched the WGN news (Chicago local station on many cable networks for some reason) every night and will update me on all the latest miseries going on there.

She cannot fathom that I am not aware of where my husband is right now.  I know he’s in California.  I’m pretty sure he flew into a town named Ontario?  But out of sight is out of mind.  There’s nothing I would/could do differently if he were in California or Texas or Oklahoma.  (And for several weeks I believe I confused a city in Oklahoma for one in Texas so even if he tells me it’s jumbled and gone by the time it takes me to type a blog post.)

The fact that Grandma is a worrier is something I can usually tolerate.  Except for the fact that she makes no attempt to tolerate the fact I am not.  And except for when she lets truly piddly shit interupt a nice evening.

Case in point: tonight, we went to dinner.  As usual, her eyes – no – her entire seated body – tracked each person that walked by our table.  I kept wanting to ask her who she was expecting to join us.  Can’t you just tune out the outside world and accept that if the person walking by is our server they will indeed stop and serve us?

But even this I can understand a little, I guess.  It must be frustrating and difficult to see as poorly as she does.  I mean, I would just happily use it as an excuse to ignore people further but I get that she’s not like that.

However, at the end of our meal someone who was not our server took her credit card and check to ring her up.  Since it wasn’t a familiar face, Grandma’s straining to watch the world pass by cranked up to infinity.  Even after I pointed out her weird behavior and said we weren’t in our rush so don’t worry about it (and she shot back, “I’m not worried!” with a little fake laugh that fooled no one).

What bugs so much is that I AM RIGHT HERE IN FRONT OF YOU TALKING TO YOU!  I could be saying something very important!  And you would miss it because you are so caught up in trying to catch the eye of a server even though you can’t remember what she looks like!

I could not help myself.  At the crux of two servers passing us and she was almost standing in her seat to get a good look at them, I blurted out the only thing I always knew would get a boyfriend’s attention for sure.

“I’m pregnant!”

“Oh, here’s the check!  I thought it was about time!  Can you tell me which one I have to sign?”

Not only did she give me a great story to tell, you can bet your sweet ass I am going to tell this story to HER next week and tease her unmercilessly.  Just not when we’re at dinner.

For the next week or so, Grandma and I can still pretend everything is normal.  I am not even sure if her surgeon told her the news…Grandma asked me while she was still in recovery and groggy on pain meds and I said yes, it was evident cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and she said, but what does that mean, no chemo right and I said, well, yes chemo is the usual treatment but we don’t have to worry about that right now and she said OK.  She hasn’t brought it up since.  We will visit the surgeon next week and that’s soon enough for me.

Grandma has been slow to get back in gear and while I understand she had a kinda major operation, I do believe she is using it as a bit of an excuse to just give in to her general tired and worried attitude.  So when I came today and found she hadn’t dressed all day, I pressed for us to eat at the pseudo-restaurant that’s part of the cafeteria.

Several times throughout the meal she conceded that the dinner was better, more fun, more relaxing and probably good for her.  I mentioned I wasn’t leaving until I saw her dressed and out doors so she might as well as have agreed to a pleasant dinner before I grand marched her.  She said she might have sensed that.  We then had the following conversation.

Me:  Now tomorrow I’ll run errands in the morning, fix lunch, and make sure you’re set for dinner before I leave.

Grandma: Oh, you don’t have to do that.  I can take care of myself.

Me:  You can, can you?

Grandma:  Yes, and I’d better.  Otherwise my granddaughter will…

Me:  Get on to you?

Grandma:  Yes!  You would not believe how tough she is!

Me:  I can imagine.

Grandma:  She’s so tough on me!

Me:  I solved that problem by not having kids.

Grandma:  Well if I had known how it would turn out, I might not have either.

Me:  Indeed.

Grandma:  That’s the problem with things like this.  You never know what you’re going to get.

The birthday party went very well.  I’ve never seen creamed spinach prepared quite like that and the cheeses used in one of the appetizers were blah, but the main courses and dessert were amazing.  I ordered speciality cakes like the display ones you see in the bakery case of your super market.  I think in the end it was cheaper than a made-to-order birthday cake and tastier too.  I purchased one white cake and one chocolate and put 9 and 0 candles in the center.  May not be a feasible way to do cake for a large party, but for the 14 of us it was perfect.

The white cake was be far everyone’s favorite – really yummy icing – and I was gracious and let Tom finish my piece only because I figured there would be some leftovers to pig out on later.  But while I was chased down with a half-full bottle of chardonney to take home (I ordered one white and one red wine to be offered and paid by the bottle), no one said boo about leftover cake.  Next time I will not be so giving with my sweets.

I was so very done with people by Sunday morning though.  And people were not done with me.  I particularly could not stand how I was the decision maker.  I even said as much when asked for the umpteenth time when we should have lunch but I was told since I had already decided when we needed to leave I had to decide when we had lunch.  Dude.  I had not “decided” when we needed to leave, it was dictacted by my Mom and George’s flight and remedial math.  Anyone else could have used additional substraction (oxymoron?) to figure out lunch time too.  But no.

I was also probably crabby because while I had packed and shopped for my mother’s special diet and George’s snack attacks, I did nothing to keep my own usual food plan on track.  Sunday’s breakfast and lunch were almost completely processed foods and carbs (hello free breakfast buffet and subsequent brunch buffet with no protein I consider edible!), I was on a blood sugar roller coaster and demanding cake for dinner. 

Poor Tom tried to steer me away, but I was set on a take-out shmorgusborg.  And then I planned out a huge, but slightly nutritious, meal from our local Greek restaurant only to have their phone ring and ring.  It’s a small local chain which has cut back hours at this location and apparently their big seller is weekday lunch.  We ended up almost coming to blows between picking another restaurant and ordering, but somehow food arrived and while I did indeed order two (smallish) desserts, I did not also order the fried trio appetizer or even get french fries with my sandwich and sometimes you just have to look for a win somewhere.  

I thought getting back on track yesterday would be easy-peasy, but I scarfed a ton of granola bars and never, ever felt full.  Even with my foolproof plan of organized activity outside the home for the late afternoon, my prime snacking time.  I don’t know what to say about today except that I really need to have one good day before everything gets set in motion again with my extended trip to Grandma’s to see her through surgery.

My poor grandmother’s medical woes really got out of hand and gummed up her birthday.  Or maybe they gave her something else to focus on and that was a good thing.  I don’t know.  But her primary care doctor got pretty snippy and thorough with her sugerical clearance appointment and all of a sudden decided she had a heart murmer that needed testing before she went under the knife.  After a rushed appointment that day, and a stress test yesterday (which was her true birthday.  Happy 90th!  Have some heart-racing drugs and lie still!), she has finally been cleared.  She has a heart murmer because when you get to be 90, you have heart murmers.

I’m thankful her doctor cares, but this was incredibly difficult for her at the last minute and in the end, considering how this cancer can/will spread, there was only one decision to be made.  She has to have the surgery, and he knew that so why be a dick about it?

Although I will admit I am getting a tad scared about this Thursday.  It’s necessary.  And she’s in good hands.  The tumor is such that she can have the least invasive surgical option.  But still.  I cannot even type what I am panicking about in my head because it is too horrible to allow words.  I know she is 90 and last I checked we have not cured the big dirt nap but it doesn’t make it any easier.

I am just so glad, crabbiness and carbs aside, that we had her birthday party.  I need to take a deep breath, pack my bag, and go hide the leftover granola bars.

My grandmother turns 90 next Monday.  Through much arm twisting and “I don’t care if you think you might die before then, we’ll have the party without you”, I have arranged a dinner party for 14 the Saturday before.

I have planned the meal, ordered the invites, taken the RSVPs complete with fish or beef selection, and nagged Tom to score free hotels both here in Clearwater for the night before (for my brother) and in Gainesville the night of the event (for me and Tom so my brother can use my grandmother’s guest room).

I have selected cakes, confirmed special meal requests with the event coordinator, and directed that the table set-up be two 7-tops versus one large table because my grandmother hates those large tables where you can barely talk to the person across the way.

I have a to-do list that includes buying candles, cute cocktail napkins, and Jack Daniel’s.  I have researched decorating dos and don’ts and come away with the idea of tying mylar balloons to potted plants and letting the guests take a plant home at the end of the night.

And yet…I really feel I suck at this party planning.  I have somehow been unable to do all of this without grace and ease to put my grandmother’s worry-wart mind to rest.  She has worried and worried over the guest list, yet every time we speak of it she decides to leave it as-is.  She worried that I might have addressed the invitations to the general delivery address of her community instead of the guests actual apartment addresses.  (For which I could not help but snap at her.  In a smiley way, yes, but still fiercely insulted.  I am 36-fucking-years-old.  I know how the postal service works.)

And through it all, she worries that she will not feel physically up to a party.  Despite the fact that I have arranged for it to be hosted in a private dining room at her community, mere steps from where she walks every single night for dinner.  And I am absolutely unable to assure her it will be fine.

On top of feeling like a failure at planning this party, she has one dear friend attending whom took it upon herself to call me up when my grandmother was first diagnosed with lymphoma and tell me how awful the chemo would be and it was horrible for grandma to go through it alone.  Grandma and I were both rather upset and insulted by this phone call as I had already planned to do my best to be there, but I was on a different career path at the time and did not have the luxury of making the choice to drop everything and make her a priority as I have done this past year. 

When this dear friend called me to RSVP, she mentioned she was looking forward to meeting me (obviously she forgot the time we ran into each other at Publix) and reminded me of that phone call and brought up how incredibly strong my grandmother was to have gone through chemo alone.

During my walk/runs (w2d1 of c25k)  in the morning I have imaginary conversations with this women, trying to figure out how I might respond if she brings it up yet again at the party.  There is a lot of swearing and tight, fake smiles in these imaginary talks.  I would dearly love to tell this old bat to fuck off, but that just doesn’t seem very hostess-like.  And since it seems my grandmother is determined to be the party-pooper at her own party, I need to plan out a response that doesn’t include a hissed, “Can you just drop it?!”

I am so over this party already, yet I still must visit with my grandmother once more this week and if I am not calm, cool, collected (yet excited and happy and chipper) about the weekend’s festivities, she’ll just worry more.

Maybe this is why people hire party-planners.  So it can be someone else’s fault when the poop hits the fan.

My poor grandmother does have quite a bit on her plate healthwise and I understand that her birthday did not fall at a particularly convenient time, cancer-wise.  But as someone who got on a plane with only 8 hours notice and would not have seen her father alive again if she had stuck to her original itinerary, I believe my family and her friends needed this chance to celebrate with her and hopefully she will feel the same after the fact.  Grandma has always been a nosy, butt-inski worrier so I have to remind myself that she’s just doing what she was born to do.