Long Time, No Talk

I just got home from a weekend at my mother's house. She had her first chemo treatment on Wednesday and is doing pretty well.

She has this dog, this black lab named Chongo that I am wickedly allergic to. I have grown up with allergies and am one of those people who is allergic to EVERYTHING. The list includes all animals with fur, dust, several weeds and grasses, crab, lemon dish soap, and certain chemicals in certain products like those needed for hair bleaching. It sucks. In general though, it's easy to handle, simply because I've grown up handling them.

As a child, there were ALWAYS nine million pets in the house. At my dad's, there were always between one and three dogs, several cats, hamsters, snakes, fish, and reptilian friends. At my mom's there was one dog and two cats that were kept (one that had no tail as a result of incestuous parents. No, seriously.) ( I need to recheck proper punctuation when using parentheses.) (Anyway.) My worst allergies are to cats, horses and crab. Those three share first place, and dogs run a close second. With those three, my eyes swell shut, I break out in to hives and with crab, my throat swells. I have an epi-pen for any accidental exposure. With dogs though, I get a lot of flu-like symptoms including a tight chest, dry cough, achy joints and a nose that completely prevents airflow, which results in a half-inch thick film coating my entire mouth every morning.

This morning I stupidly scraped the top of my mouth with my nail and almost puked at the result. It was gross. Anyway, I am allergic to Chongo. So while I had planned on updating when I was at my mom's house, I forgot completely in the effort to try to breathe correctly.

Now we're back home and I've changed immediately in to pajama pants and curled up on the reading couch with a book and a cup of tea. I was hoping the tea would help, that coming back to where I live (a place free of animals, lemon dish soap, shellfish and weeds) would immediately clear up my nasal passages. I have been popping Sam's brand Zyrtec like it is made of chocolate, and I'm sitting here at my computer about to fall over from the weight of the snot in my head. I seriously feel like everything above cheekbone level is going to blow up and leave The Girlfriend with a three year old who won't eat her dinner and walls covered in a lovely mucus-brain-goo mixture. It sucks. To say the least.

As for the serious things in my life, the serious things with my mother being at the top of that list, I have this disease where I can't talk about anything that I'm going through at the moment because it's too raw. I will attempt to. And I will also attempt to not (split infinitive! whoo!) avoid this blog as a means of, well, avoidance. I will say though that my mother is confident that she will beat this, that she will beat this cancer and that gives me confidence. I'm planning a huge Fuck Cancer Party for her, one that will involve lots of fun signs around the room and lots of laughter and I'm hoping that after that I can do some sort of something that involves raising money for cancer research. My heart is in a lot of places. But this one is hitting my mom, has hit every woman in my family over the age of 35, will hit me and will hit my daughter. I hope by the time Emily has to deal with these things that there will be a vaccine, a cure, or a treatment that doesn't involve extreme fatigue and hair loss and sometimes death as a side effect.

See, here I go, getting in to the serious shit. I can't handle it right now, because I get so angry, so angry that this disease and plague is in my family, so angry that I have to face, already, at twenty-two that my parents may not be immortal, and I just can't deal.

So. I'm going to stand up and try not to beat the three year old who begged for food for over an hour and is now refusing the thing she picked out.
Pray, people, for a cure to cancer and a cure to allergies.