Journal

Lindsay is my new favourite person for today. She’s made of the happiness of children and the songs of angels, and every home should have one! :)

More MMA goodness today. Today we trained with a well known Dutch Sanda trainer Lou Hoyer and his son Danny, concentrating mostly on striking, sprawling and quick throws. I can see bruises forming all along my arms again, and there’s a welt on my upper leg from some low-kicks I received. I am so exhausted right now, because I haven’t been sleeping well, and because of that grueling training but I feel…accomplished. I wouldn’t want to say good, because I hurt so much that even the balls of my feet hurt when I stand on them. Come to think of it, I have some nasty blood-blisters on them that I should be taking care of.

In other news, last night I picked up my mother from the hospital, which was one of the scariest experiences of my life. She had gone through her second chemo-therapy, and for some reason she was completely out of it. She had been feeling under the weather when she went in on thursday, and she’s been sleeping for almost all the time she was there, which resulted in her missing some of her scheduled medication times, but she couldn’t even stand on her feet by the time I got her to take her home. She kept falling asleep, and when she wasn’t she was rocking back and forth, not really as lucid as I would’ve liked her to be, and just moaning in pain. Everyone who knows my mother knows she’s fucking hardcore, but this was something else. In the car over, she kept falling asleep, and I kept wondering if something horrible was going to happen, that’s how bad she looked. At one point I thought we might have to turn around and go back to the hospital. My fears weren’t exactly calmed by the fact that she had been vomiting up blood recently, which I can’t imagine is a good sign in any situation. Anyway, we got home, where she wanted nothing more than to sit on the sofa and nod in and out of sleep while listening to her children talk and watch television. We got her to drink something and finally put her to bed. I slept on the sofa (yay, another bad night’s sleep) but kept waking up at the slightest sounds to check on my mother upstairs (yay, no sleep at all!) so all in all I’m pretty dead right now. Luckily, when my mother woke up this morning, she was feeling a lot better than she did last night. I’m not sure if she can survive another chemo-run, but this friday they’re going to scan her to see what the results of the first two treatments have been.

Luckily the weather’s nice, so I’m enjoying a nice cup of tea sitting near my open window, listening to the people downstairs, outside on the terrace of L’Affiche.

It’s not that I have trouble sleeping, I just don’t. Sleep, that is. When I eventually go to bed I fall asleep almost instantly, which my mother claims is not very good for you since you need some time to let yourself unwind, and is a sign that I’m suffering from exhaustion. I don’t know if that’s true, but as it stands, I sleep no more than 7 hours, and when I go to bed late usually less than that. When I wake up I am perhaps unable, but probably unwilling to go back to sleep. As a result I often feel very tired, and I’m not even sure if I really know what it feels like to be rested. I’m getting used to the constant inability to concentrate, the deteriorated short term memory and the nagging discomfort (especially when I should be feeling comfortable, because I might fall asleep at any moment. The more comfort, the less comfortable.) I have to trick my body into staying awake by constantly moving. That’s not easy when you have a sedentary job. Whenever I feel my eyelids getting heavy, I do fourty push-ups to get my blood flowing and I continue working. All that and still I refuse to sleep. Even now, it’s almost three and I know I’ll probably get about five hours of sleep, but still I just don’t feel like going. I literally have to force myself, which is exactly what I’m about to do. Here goes…

My mother is in the hospital again for her second chemo treatment. She’s nervous and afraid because the first treatment took so much out of her and made her terribly ill. When I called her this morning she sounded like she didn’t want to go through with it. She had also been ill the night before, had vomitted up bile and blood, and had a slight fever. I’m bracing myself for bad news soon. It was very hard to stay strong while I had her on the phone, regardless of being at work. Usually I keep my world strictly separate, but this thing has me so high strung I can’t help it anymore.