Helpless and Powerless, Save For a Hummingbird
My mother’s first chemo experience
Two years ago, my mother would walk into the Allan Blair Cancer Clinic in Regina, Saskatchewan to undergo her first chemo treatment. She had a preliminary cancer diagnosis two weeks previous that was considered “serious”, but deemed “manageable”.
When she first entered the patient’s area, she started to tear up because this was a replay of 2009 when my father would be a regular visitor here. It brought back some painful memories of the last year with him and how things had ended. It seemed like it was now her turn to enter into the same fate.
Because of all this swirling in her head, she was unable to focus. She went to hold her cup of water, tipped it over, and spilled it all over the floor. She apologized repeatedly to the nursing staff, held her hands to her face, and sobbed. I put my hand on mom’s shoulder and told her it’s not a big deal, that it’s just a cup of water, and a towel would easily remedy the situation.
But it wasn’t about the cup of water; it was about being powerless and helpless.
In the midst of all this, we were bombarded with copious amounts of information. We might as well have heard the “beep beep beep” of a backup alarm as it felt like a truck descending upon us and dumping the…
