Slipping Away

My mom’s speech is slipping away.

She’s having a harder time speaking – more grasping for words, more frustration when she can’t say what she wants to say, more times when she just can’t finish her sentences because the words just won’t come.

It’s a subtle difference, I guess, unless you’re around her a lot. But I know my dad and I can tell. I know she can tell. She just can’t speak as well as she did before.

The common phrases, the niceties – those have stayed. But she can’t find the words to talk about what the doctor said, or who visited, or who sent her the flowers for her birthday. At least she can still say “I love you.”

We don’t know for sure why her speech is slipping. It might be the chemo (she’s officially getting sick from the chemo. The first month she was really, really tired, this month she had stomach flu-like symptoms). It might be just general tiredness. Or it might be the microtumors that we can’t see on the MRI eating away at the part of her brain that controls her speech.

Whatever the reason, I’m not ready for it. I’ve been really liking this plateau that we’ve been at – this stable place with few surprises. It’s been easier to live life, business as usual (or at least, business as usual since my new usual started in August), without fearing the next traumatic event. It’s been so easy I’d almost forgotten that it’s going to end, that she’s going to eventually going to go downhill, that she’ll slowly go backwards in her progress as the tumors take over.

I don’t know if her speech will improve. I hope it does. But if it doesn’t, I need to start readying myself, whatever that looks like, for what’s coming next. I just wish I knew how to do that.