Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma – the reason my mother splatters her food

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I asked my Mom today, what the most important thing to her right now was (after doing the 20 questions tag *smile*) and she replied without hesitation, “Tessa!”

My mother adores Tee so much that she spoils her with anything and everything Tee so desires. The day before yesterday, Tee got a new Leapfrog fridge word whammer and 3 large wall posters (2 ABC posters that we cut up into individual alphabets to make alphabet cards and 1 flags of the world poster for the toddler bedroom that she never sleeps in).

Yesterday, Tee got a new Thomas the Tank Engine Japanese train set. It’s really cool as it has an electronic baby train that moves! She already has the British version, the classic. The one with the wooden tracks and stations, like the one you see at Choo Choo Train. Only very spoilt children have those. Then she has a full wardrobe of clothes and not enough days to wear everything, not even half. We even have to label her wardrobe just so we can find things. So you see how my Mother spoils her……

Today, my Mother’s tongue was bleeding. For awhile now, she splatters her food sometimes when she eats because she has no control over the muscles on half her tongue. She kept absorbing the blood with some cotton buds when she finally asked me to check what it was. When I saw her tongue, I was horrified.

I was looking at raw craters of pus under her tongue (one of which was bleeding) and then two thirds of her tongue was swollen and deformed. It wasn’t one big blob kind of swollen. It was a tongue that was forced with various sized objects within it’s already small area; and the objects looked like they were dying to come out, pushing against her stretched tongue skin. It looked fucking painful.

My Mom has had cancer for five years now and still going strong although she is in pain everyday. Every single fucking day. Her killer painkillers don’t help so I wonder why they call it pain killers. They should call it pain pringles or body harmers.

I wish I could do something to lessen the pain. I wish I had enough jokes to tell her to take her mind off it. I wish she had a support group of people who are going though the same thing but it is such a rare form of cancer that in Malaysia alone, only a handful of cases exist. And I wish she could live for another thirty years, for I cannot imagine my life without her. At all.

What more with Tee? It would kill her too. For sure.