Sorry to have 2 doom and gloom blog posts in a row, but that’s just how life goes sometimes…

Basically, we found out from the doctors this week that Mum has only got a few weeks left. I’m not going to be able to make it on fieldwork to Spain now and I’m not sure about the bits of term after that. The plan at the moment is that Mum is coming out of hospital and we’re going to have her here, with nursing support, possibly moving to a hospice at some point.

I’m not planning to just sit around at home moping, but at the same time Mum does need someone with her 24/7, and even with nursing support, a big chunk of that falls on me, my Dad and my sister.

At the moment we’re all running round like headless chickens now to get the house sorted for Mum…arranging our lounge as a bedroom, covering the wooden floor with rugs, learning how to use oxygen cylinders, and arranging logistics with nurses as well as letting all of our friends and family know what is going on!

So sorry I haven’t done a blog entry in ages. I remember following a couple of student bloggers before I came to uni and I remember how it was a bit frustrating to find huge time gaps in between posts.

However something I haven’t mentioned on here is that my Mum is terminally ill with cancer. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was at the end of Year 12 – in fact on the same day as the Open Day I came to here. After major surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy over the next year, we hoped she was in remission.

I came to uni hoping my Mum was better and we could put all of that stuff behind us – but we found out just before Christmas that the cancer was back and had spread to her bones. Recently things haven’t been going too well, it’s now also spread to her liver. She can’t walk more than a few paces and 2 of her vertebrae have partially collapsed, meaning she’s on Class A restricted painkiller drugs at the moment.

 I don’t always like telling people this, mainly because it feels so awkward when people don’t know what to say. Not that I’m much better, I’ve had to learn a few cliched phrases to use at appropriate moments with cancer patients, so as to avoid a sort of open mouthed “Oh….er….um….well…that’s quite bad?!”

It means my Easter holiday so farhas been spent in a chaotic whirlwind of hospital visits, getting a cleaner, taxiing my little sister around -  oh and a little revision on the side! I guess it also means that over the last few  months I’ve come home from uni a bit more than some of my friends have, and I have to plan my social life around things a bit more. But I like to keep a positive outlook, I still have a laugh with my family and friends – if I walked round being miserable, it just wouldn’t help anything!

The way I see it is that  bad stuff happens to good people sometimes in life – and you just have to deal with it. I’m just lucky I have such a great set of people around me to help me deal with everything.