Looking Up My Back Door

I will be cursing at my mother for the next two days.  I will be suffering great indignities in response to my mother’s fears.  Yes, in keeping with my tradition of telling everyone my business, I am letting ya’all know that tomorrow I will be refraining from all solid food and drinking a nasty concoction that will require that I stay close to my own bathroom so that on Monday perfect strangers will be allowed to enter a place just north of that which cannot be named in Michigan.

Why do I blame my mother? I understand that I am being irrational.  It has less to do with blame than it has to do with being reminded of why she died.  If she had been willing to go through this same indignity she may still be here.  She may have been able to take that boat to Paris with my sister.  My mother feared, yes, feared, colonoscopies.   In 2006 she had a colonoscopy for which she had not prepared correctly due to her revulsion of the preparatory cocktail.  Combine that with the fact that her blood pressure skyrocketed during the procedure and they weren’t able to travel to the far reaches of her intestinal galaxy, they failed to find what eventually killed her. 

When she started experiencing abdominal pain, she refused another colonoscopy, stating that she had one the previous year (but we know how that went) and that she refused to drink the Go-Lytely (isn’t that the most ridiculous name for something that works like industrial strength Drano?).  My head still shakes at this.  Yes, I have issues.

My mother is also the same woman who let an ulcer on her leg go untreated for a year because she knew that it meant she had Type II diabetes and she didn’t want to deal with it.  I miss her, I really do.  I just wish she was here so I didn’t have to miss her.  Because of her refusal to get things looked after I don’t have a mother.  I feel jealous when I hear someone talking about their feisty 80 year old mother.  I miss the Sunday afternoon phone calls.  I wish she was here so I could fuss her out!

So, yes, I may sound like a hypochondriac at times, but having had four important people in my life die of four different forms of cancer in the past seven years, I get a little cautious about symptoms.  Three out of the four were women and they all died before the age of 70.  At 56 years old, that just seems a little too close to me.  Death doesn’t scare me.  I see that as a great adventure.  What I don’t want is cancer or any other condition that incapacitates, causes great pain, or reduces my ability to think, get to the bathroom, or take care of myself.  I don’t want my body pumped full of chemicals to kill something that shouldn’t be there and possibility destroy things that should be. 

If drinking a couple of quarts of nastiness and spending a lot of time reading on the toilet means that I can avoid all that, then I say pour me another and get me a another issue of People magazine (I think the bathroom is the perfect place for reading trash).  On Monday, I will be okay.  I like the drugs they use and I have an excuse to sleep for a good portion of the day. 

In lieu of photos of the event, I offer this video and song in honor of the occasion.

Thank you, Patricia Raymond and B.J. Liederman!!