smokingboot

'Is it a real cancer?'
I lost my temper with her when she asked that, blew up. Asked her if she thought I had stuffed a sock up my bra or something. Told her that however terrified she might be at the idea of me having surgery, I am more terrified, and if I can face it, she can try to be a grown-up about it and respect what I am going through. She talks about Dostarlimab and test trials, Guanabana, lumps that just disappear. And besides...
'You said when you left the hospital it was 2.5mms. Now it's 2.5cms.'
'I made a mistake, my head was all over the place.'
'Are you sure?'
Because here we are again, it's all about the bad people who want to cut into you, maybe place a recording device or something worse somewhere inside you, the malign and ultimate authority that at the very least wants to make you unhappy and probably seeks to destroy you. She'll risk your life to save you from that.
I just couldn't handle any of it. My mother magnifies hysteria more surely than she does anything else, and right now, on my best day I am functioning at 40%. I get that she cannot be part of this reality, she must needs have her own, but right now it is very hard to sustain.
The best way to describe this situation is as some sealed terrarium in which grows a beautiful but extremely poisonous plant. It pretty much covers everything within the glass and the whole terrarium has become about it, but OK. If you remove the stopper - or if the plant grows so strong it can push the stopper out by the growth of its stalks - it's not just the ecosystem in the bottle that's at risk. The pollen and scent escapes and both are seriously bad for you. The plant can't exist for long outside its reality but its reality will, given room to spread, quickly destroy yours. It can kill you, no joke. My mother means well with her advice, but had I followed it re the long ago melanoma ('don't have surgery, put a plaster on it'), I would be dead. Once it was gone she denied there had ever been a mole on that part of my arm.
Blimey, tortured metaphors and a truly bizarre paragraph! Never mind, I'll let myself off today; if I didn't understand that I am tired and ill before, I accept it now. My brother's response was
that she is selfish and self obsessed. He doesn't quite get her lack of agency, though in other ways he's clued in, at once terse and more lucid.

'There has to be a balance. The unreality is exhausting and corrosive.'