en route

I pblogged this on the plane, so here I am transcribing:

I really like this airline. This was pretty much the least-bad transatlantic flying experience I can recall. Flying is never yayfun, but this was not nearly as unpleasant as I've come to expect. I'd say we should ditch Lufthansa and fly SAS from now on, if that didn't mean we'd have to fly up to Copenhagen to get down to Spain.

I made a few swaps Stateside. E.g., I found a green denim jacket hanging on the coatrack, and after much deliberation, I adopted it and left my blue denim jacket behind. Ditto daypacks. The one I brought was given to Robert by Georg - not as a gift from the heart, but as an alternative to chucking it - and it was, you know, an okay daypack. Gray. One hole. But Mom's daypack is black (I still can't imagine why she had it - she hated black) and has water-bottle pockets and packs smaller, so is better for traveling, so I ditched the gray one. Hope Robert doesn't mind (note from later, 1 November: he hasn't even noticed yet).

ANYWAY. The point of this unnecessarily long exposition is that I found a little notebook in the backpack, and it's her "Medical Journal". She started it in June of 2004, and it tracks the whole thing, the discovery of the tumors, her symptoms, changes in medications. Not very in-depth, it's just notes, but it's weird to see the whole thing documented, and to see her handwriting deteriorate over time. I didn't follow the process, here in the blog or anywhere else, because I held onto the hope that it was no big deal and she'd get better. Right up until Tuesday, 11 October, when Dr. C called to say the tumor in her back was spreading, and we knew then that she was much too weak for anymore therapy, and she wasn't going to recover. Not even temporarily. It really seems like I should have known sooner, in hindsight, though I can't say when I should have realized. I just spent so much time reading about cancer survivors that it didn't occur to me that she wouldn't beat it.