Grief

My mom has been complaining about a pain in her hip for months. She was doing physical therapy and taking prescription NSAID’s when she started rapidly losing weight. She thought the weight loss was the NSAID’s but her doctor didn’t think so. She had a chest scan and it revealed a mass in her lung which was diagnosed as non-small cell adenocarcinoma. The pain in her hip, it was revealed, was due to the cancer spreading to her bones.

The good news is, it’s not in her brain and there are no fractures in her hip or femur where she’s been in so much pain.

I’ll take whatever good news I can get.

My mom is the reason I run. When I ran my first half marathon back in 2013, the reason my sister and I both said ‘well, I’m a natural runner, it will be fine!’ is because our mother is a natural runner.

She leads by example in eating a healthy balanced diet and making healthy choices like saying ‘no’ to a glass of wine if you’ve taken Tylenol earlier that day. She lead the charge in my family for recognizing juice for the sugary scam that it is. She quit smoking nearly two decades ago.

But here we are.

Truly, I just want to pour wine on my feelings, crush them under pie and nachos. But that isn’t what I’m doing (except when it is… I’m not perfect, sometimes that is exactly what I’m doing). Instead, I’m trying to cook more at home. I’m limiting my wine consumption to Friday and Saturday and keeping my promise to my dog to take her on a good long walk every morning and doing a workout video at least three times a week.

Mom isn’t giving up and neither am I.