When it rains, it pours...

Ok, I'm not normally a negative person....oh who am I kidding, but I don't like to publicly feel sorry for myself. Please don't think that's what this is, it is a source of venting and a place for people to find out without me getting choked up over questions:

After 6 years of Florida bliss, I am finally moving back home to St. Louis this summer. This has been something I knew I would eventually do for some time now, but when I went home for the holidays it just solidified that I needed to get home as soon as possible. If I could, I would have quit my job then and there and moved back.

Put quite simply, when I returned home I not only learned that my cousin Ashley (who has been much more like a sister to me, she is the only one who gets me and can see through me) has cancer and will be put through a rigorous treatment involving surgeries, radiation, and chemo in the coming months, but I also learned that my mom's mystery conditions finally had a name. Actually two auto-immune diseases. One disease is eating away at her muscles in her legs causing them to be sickly skinny, and the other (Scleroderma) is basically a hardening of the skin.

For a while after the holidays I was pretty depressed, drank a lot to try and forget, and felt pretty damn sorry for myself. It wasn't until recently that I started feeling like myself again, and the rest of the family seemed to be moving on too. I was embracing "The Year of Me," I was doing new things, I went to Vegas, I met a great guy...things were looking really good. I actually got to the point where I would forget about my problems back home.

Then last week it all began to go downhill again. School was getting on my nerves, George was moving back to St. Louis, and then my mom called me Thursday. Thursday was the 3 year anniversary of my cousin Andrew's death. Andrew died after a party the night I should have graduated, the night my entire family SHOULD have been here in Florida with me, not at parties with false friends. That phone call was a bummer.

Monday I get a second phone call from Mom reminding me that Ashley starts chemo in a week. More of reality hitting me hard.

Finally, my mom calls me Wednesday night to tell me about a biopsy she is having the next day. The doctors seem to think the Scleroderma may have spread to her kidneys. From everything I've read, Scleroderma is relatively manageable as long as it remains external. Once the disease begins to affect the organs, it's pretty much downhill. We won't know anything for a week.

I miss how things were 2 weeks ago, when I was blissfully forgetful about the true reasons I wanted to go home. When all seemed to be going well because Mom would "casually forget" to tell me about her doctor's appointments. When Ashley and I would call each other to talk about our nights out with the girls, not having her port for chemo surgically implanted. Why can't these things ever happen one at a time, giving me time to grasp the situation. Every time I am literally bombarded with bad news and sighful phone calls.

I promise my next blog will be a positive one! :-)