July 10, 2007 - 12:05 AM.

Dame it

That is my son's little baby-curse, "Dame it."

Mine is more like "Shitfuck, Geez of Nazareth." Because my mother-in-law's body has grown some more cancer, this time in her lung. "It's terminal, there's no cure, and they've given me two years, maybe more, maybe less," she says.

Those shitfuckers. What kind of healer gives you a sentence like that?

I will see what I can do to interest her in homeopathy and Essiac, but I don't really expect her to be any more into it now than she was before. I feel for her, trapped in a medical paradigm that does not deal in hope. For all the crap J. goes through with rheumatoid arthritis, at least I have been able to help him keep working toward positive, happy results. We don't always get them, but I am the one who searches far and wide for approaches, and he is the one who takes the plunge and tries them. With his mother, it's all about the doctors being right, and while I will admit that they do some things well, others they're just as confused about as we are, and they should not be consulted as expert *solvers.* Expert *describers* - maybe. But they are not the only possible source of cure, and I hope she lets me show her other possibilities.

I will play the grandson card if I have to. The Punim needs all four of his grandparents - he's too little to do without any of them at this point. My mother agreed to lots of conventional medicine in order to stay around for him; now I think it's Gyamma's turn to pony up for the acupuncture and drink a little herb tea. I just have to find a way to insist on this without sounding like a controlling harpy, which is how I sound now.

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