I miss her. Today more than all the others, obviously. She would have turned 49 years old...Aunt Debbie would have made her favorite birthday treat...a cherry chip cake with lots of extra frosting. We would have belted the birthday song and rounded it out with, "...and maaaany mooooore!" as she extinguished the charitable truncation of candles adorning the frosting-heavy monstrosity. We wished her the same last year, and it didn't so much work...but if Cancer can be vanquished by sheer determination and will, hers would have been. I think just about any one of us would have gladly taken her place, standing there at Death's threshold...she was just that kind of woman.

I feel as though I'm living on a treadmill of dejà vu. Everything seems to be a replay of an event that's already happened, every feeling of worthlessness and uselessness renewing their plug for airtime. I have my surgical follow up this Friday, and I'm terrified a horned demon is going to jump from a cabinet and tell me that I have Cancer after all. Forgive me for not accepting good news as the final word...we had lots of good news with Mom.

For instance, the Fall of 2003 when they removed 17 tumors from her body and the surgeon (and, incidentally, by design, my surgeon), told us she was Cancer free that day in the waiting room. I remember going to the chapel and sobbing my thanks to God. We thought remission was possible in those days...I even remember Debbie buying Mom a Cancer Sucks tee...Chris McHugh had passed away just a few months earlier, and she was a local hero...still is, really. I remember Mom's reaction in opening the garment box, just days before her surgery...her mouth offered a parody of a smile as she said, "I don't plan on having Cancer much longer."

See, this is all before they dropped the bomb: "Liela, you will never be Cancer free...but you have a solid 15 years left." And two years later...well, you know the rest. And one just cannot forget the seeming wonderful news at the end of last December...that her tumors ceased in their growth. The Cancer was going away? Awesome!

A month later, we greeted friends and family at her memorial service.

Last year on the fourteenth, I remember attending church and then coming home to a birthday celebration to rival the return of Caesar to his beloved Rome. We were all so happy, soaking in the blessing of just a little more time...always just a little more time. I miss her hugs and her voice...I miss her soft skin and her sparkling smile...I miss her silliness and her seriousness both. I miss her ears, always open and happy to let me philosophize...and I miss the best parent, nurturer, and friend anybody could ever know. Happy Birthday, Momma...keep looking out for me, will you? I still need you.

I am no longer on prescribed medication, having swallowed my last horse-pill-ish antibiotic just this morning. It was a big moment for me. Prescription medication seems to have a lot of nasty side effects...at least with the strong stuff they give you when you've had an abscess in your backside drained of a liter and a half of fluid, anyway. As I was being discharged (and note that I was BEING discharged...let's not have a repeat of Nick telling a coworker as we were completing the final parts of my hospital stay, "She's discharging right now.") my surgeon said the antibiotics they were putting me on were most probably overkill, but she just really wanted to make sure my inner-ugly was dead and gone forever.

Now, the next leg in my journey is filling my time. Jeff and Kara stopped by last night and dropped off several seasons of South Park. Now, I clearly remember telling Mark in December that I would never, ever watch South Park...ever. Moreover, I clearly remember rolling my eyes at Sarah and Jason, back in the day, when they would quote the darn show. I guess, being that I've climbed the ladder of evolution in regards to my lacking tailbone, it's time for the head to regress a touch...even the score a bit, so to speak:

I don't think I ever fully appreciated what Mom's recovery must have felt like. I feel so imprisoned...my mind is racing, active, absorbent, and hell-bent to join the land of the living again...but the body just isn't willing. I feel like I'm wasting my days, and so help me God I will never understand the life of a couch potato. I want to run and jump and be like all of the rest of the kids!

Simple tasks that I know I should be able to do leave me sweaty and dizzy, and I'm frustrated that I can't force myself better. And, I'm land-locked...no where to go but the couch... or a few feet over, the kitchen...I limit my use of the stairs after a klutzy accident on Monday that sent me head-first into a wall...I joked with Nick that I was just relieved it wasn't the other end.

But really, it's a bad moment when you realize that you cannot outsmart the cosmic forces of nature, the supernatural, or the divine...strangely, patience isn't a value that I typically lack. I think I just want to run away from this mess, from the memories, from the implications, from what the future may hold. I just want life to lighten up already.

That being said, I won't look a gift horse in the mouth...my family's received some good news as of late...for the moment, they're calling me Cancer-free, my aunt's breast tissue biopsy came back benign, and my father's sinus problems have cleared, thereby cancelling the surgery they were scheduling. I really have no reason to complain...I just have a brain with too much time to think and too little to think about. I want my body to accelerate and hopefully catch up some day very, very soon.

So after a lot of back-and-forth discussion between my physician and my physicians' assistant regarding the ct scan results, I was referred to my mother's surgeon, and had a consultation appointment set for Tuesday-last...the first of August, the month of both our birthdays. By Tuesday, I was in so much pain, the percocets weren't even touching it...and I woke that morning with a chapped face and a tear-dampened pillow.

Nick took the morning off from work to deliver me to my 10-AM consultation. Sitting had become impossible by that point, and my tush was so bruised, swollen, and fevered over my tailbone, or where the tailbone is supposed to be. Nick had taken to driving a passenger sprawled on her belly on a reclined seat.

So almost as soon as Dr. Weber sees me, she tells me that she's going to admit me to the hospital...if nothing else for pain control. The surreal moment was walking into the examination room before she arrived there, and seeing my mother's oncologist with a team of other doctors studying my x-rays...I gather they were mine from the bits of conversation Nick overheard.

That's pretty much my last really vivid memory from last week. I remember the IV drugs not working...not the morphine, not the next step higher with the clickie-pain dispenser thing, and I vaguely remember being told that I had an operating room date at 8:30 the next morning.

So a week of very poor hygiene and a red blanket of pain is what I remember...that, and a lot of visits from Nick. When I left on Friday, I learned that I had a major infection that's probably been building for awhile...in fact, they drained a liter and a half (!) of fluid from my butt, and I have a wound that requires gauze packing and unpacking two times every day...for which Nick has offered his services. I'm so grateful.

Oh, and I truly do not have a tailbone. I just didn't grow the thing...as Nick says, I'm just higher on the evolutionary ladder, seeing as humans don't so much need tails and therefore, the corresponding bones. When Sarah and Jason visited, Jason coupled that with the fact that I only have one wisdom tooth trying to muck up my mouth, and we humans don't really need those either. I find it all very funny as one of my last days at work, we were joking that me and my fellow short co-worker both could raise one eyebrow in quizzical pose. It was hypothesized that we were the next wave of evolution—small with muscular eyebrows.

The disturbing part, obviously, is I've always felt a bump where my tailbone should have been...I've invited many over the past years to feel my "tailbone" because it just didn't feel right. It hurt me often, and I am very ginger with it. Disturbing yet, is that there was no smoking gun to be found in the operating room. What caused the infection is unknown, meaning it could happen again. So, I'm to heal from this leg of the journey and then we do more scans, more tests, and consider surgery to look for the monster living in my body. The sample they sent off came back benign by way of Cancer...so I'm going to consider myself Cancer-free for now, and hope that the ugly inside of me can be vanquished before it can strike again.

They say I have to be off from work for a month-plus...I'm hoping it will be shorter than that...I'm going to go crazy otherwise, and I want to be a responsible, employed, card-carrying member of adulthood. For now, I'll end here, I just wanted to give you an update. I'm doing much better, and Nick is the best caregiver I could have asked for...

...Even so, I'm heavy-hearted with thoughts of my mother. Thoughts of being sick as a youngster...her constructing a makeshift bed on the sun-drenched couch and making me a Bisquick pancake, cutting it in squares because I prefer my Bisquick pancakes plain, and eaten as finger food...which few knew but her. I remember her resting cool, damp cloths over my forehead and smoothing the hair from my brow. I remember her making fresh-squeezed, pulpy orange juice for me because she knew how much I loved an orange juice that nearly required teeth to consume. Most of all, I remember feeling rotten, but hearing her voice and knowing all would be ok.