The Bearable Lightness of Being

This morning my mother called to check on my husband who hasn't been feeling well. Recovering from a sinus infection herself, her voice was still weak and a little broken. When I mentioned it, she said "Yeah, I need to get back to my voice exercises. I'm supposed to be doing them for the rest of my life and I haven't done them in two years."

I chuckled at the irony of her remark and soon we were both laughing, a moment's reprieve from our more serious concerns. And an uplifting reminder that in spite of coping with increasing medical challenges, my mother has a way of making lemonade out of the sourest of lemons.

Last week I took her to the outpatient surgery center for a caudal epidural of steroid, the hoped for remedy to a painful spinal stenosis that undoubtedly worsened this summer after 6 weeks in a cast for a broken foot. Just prior to treatment for the stenosis, I and other family members rotated shifts to take her to a local hospital for a two week regimen of daily IV antibiotic infusions, her only treatment option for a serious infection. Before that she had a partial procedure to improve blood flow to her legs and feet and at the beginning of the year, she tripped and fell on a city sidewalk severely bruising her hand and upper lip where a feint scar remains as a reminder.

Yet, through all of these trials she has maintained her sense of humor, the most recent example evident when she completed paperwork in the over-crowded waiting room of the surgery center. She turned to me when tasked with answering the all-too familiar questions about reproductive health on the medical questionnaire and said, "Sometimes I just want to write 'are you serious?'"

Trying to lighten her mood, I egged her on with "Well, why don't you?" We exchanged a glance and with a wry smile she filled that in as her response to "When was your last menstrual cycle?" When it came to answering "Are you pregnant?" she wrote, "I sure hope not." Admittedly, I suggested that last answer.

We both had a good laugh, a release of tension at the uncertainty of things to come and at least a momentary belief that the only answer that really matters sometimes is that laughter can be the best medicine.