the very idea that I could lose my mother makes my heart feel like someone has it in a clenched fist.  I start to have a hard time breathing and I feel so much pain centered on my chest.  The breath just seems to have left me and I can't suck enough in to make my lungs keep from bursting.  I know it's not a panic attack because I have plenty of those over the years.  It's something worse, far worse.  It's fear, and sadness and pain mixed together.  There's no word for it.  It's not grief, not yet.  It's can't be.  I don't want to mourn her until she isn't there.  I don't want to keep thinking about it like that.  Though we have already discussed her funeral arrangements and it's there in the back of your mind the realization that these may not be the plans for a later time.   

The chemo has already started and she is well and truly sick this time.  She has little energy, dad says she just "hits a wall" and has to go back to bed.  I think he feels the doctor was trying to tie things up into a pretty ribbon at points and telling her she would be fine.  The doctor had said it wasn't going to be a tough as the interfuron and we were all ready for this to be a piece of cake.  But the interfuron was 5 years ago, she was younger, healthier and mentally at a different place.  She knew she could win it.  She had been given a time frame of how long the chemo would go on and what the results would be.  This time we are waiting on a ledge for results.  This time we have to live it in 4 month increments to see if the chemo is causing the tumor to shrink.  This time, she truly is teetering between hoping she can fight this and believing she will die. 

That's no way to live...waiting, wondering and weakening...