The post I wanted to write was about finishing up a book proposal on Thursday that I've been spending a whole bunch of the past few weeks working on, and now it's in my agent's inbox and hopefully will get a good response.
Instead, I'm writing a different post. My mom had what appears to be a small stroke yesterday. Fortunately, my stepdad recognized quickly what was going on and rushed her to the hospital and they were able to give her an clot-busting medication that will hopefully limit the damage. She seems to be doing well-- no motor deficits at all, memory seems ok for now, and there's just some small language issues-- having some trouble saying all the words she wants to say, and sometimes the speech comes out garbled, and some similar trouble with reading. But it got noticeably better as the hours passed post-medication, and she seemed more like herself last night, and was able to read a little bit-- the problem seeming like it's less about understanding what she's reading than about reading it aloud, so that's good. Apparently the stroke-- they're assuming at this point it was a stroke unless they find evidence otherwise-- was small enough that it wasn't coming up on the first read of the MRI-- but they're doing more tests to figure out what happened, why it happened, and the best ways to avoid something similar or worse happening again.
It feels a little bizarre that only about a year after my grandma's stroke, my mom has something similar and hitting what seems like a similar area of the brain-- my grandma had this same word-finding problem in the hours and days after the stroke, until we started to realize the problem ran deeper than that and her memory was really quite affected. But her stroke was very much visible on the scans and so hopefully that means my mom's was much, much smaller and won't leave her with the same kinds of memory issues and inability to be independent that my grandma has unfortunately had to deal with.
The plausible theory is that my mom's breast and kidney cancers over the past couple of years made her blood more likely to coagulate-- apparently an issue with people who've had cancer-- and thus more susceptible to something like this.
But fingers crossed that the damage is minimal and it'll resolve itself over the next few days, especially because we were able to get her the clot-busting drug quickly.
She thought she was out of the woods post-the cancer stuff over the past few years, but it just seems like it never really ends. Hearing Nina's stories from work, and really just as we get to an age where parents get older, it seems like for everyone, sadly, a good part of life ends up being about dealing with illness, yours or others. And it sucks. For everyone.
That was a fairly incoherent paragraph, but maybe there's a point there somewhere.
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