Aila
I can honestly say that I almost never thought about cancer in relationship to my own life before the end of June this year, which was when we learned from my mother’s autopsy that she had in fact died from metastatic ovarian cancer. Of course, she’d also died from Alzheimer’s, which we had long suspected was the real diagnosis, but what finally killed her was cancer. Our amazing 10-year-old dog, Trinidad, was also diagnosed with anal sac adenocarcinoma around the same time. While shocking by some measure, both my mother and Trinidad had lived lives by the time of their diagnoses. Perhaps their lives hadn’t reached the longevity that we were hoping for, but they had each lived.
“I hot,” she said sometime around 2am on Monday, August 3rd, 2015. To the touch, she was indeed hot. It made sense, as her two brothers were beginning to have diarrhea, and the past week Brian had felt really poorly the day after he thoroughly cleaned our front-loading washing machine, which has an ongoing hankering for collecting mold in its crevices. The day after the cleaning, even I had felt headachey, blaming myself for staying up too late and not drinking enough water.