The entire week was gloomy as there’s this typhoon up north that is pulling the southwest monsoon. It’s so perfect for just staying in bed but I can’t.

I want to romanticize my daily life as a way to help myself heal some more. But life has other plans…

In a way, however, my daughter’s illness put me on the right track and brought proper perspective. It somewhat helped me heal in the process because prior to her illness, I was focusing on the wrong things, there were illegal settlers in my head occupying precious real estate there. I was filled with anger and frustration. I took everything for granted.

Now I realize that life is so fragile and it can be taken from you in a snap.

I can see that my mom is already having early signs of Alzheimer’s, which I have seen and experienced from my maternal grandma some 30 years before. Even though I kept on repeating my daughter’s diagnosis to her, she always keeps on forgetting it and my fear is that she will mistakenly tell the UP Manila chancellor that my daughter has peritoneal carcinomatosis when she emails her. My siblings and I will be tricking my mom into having an executive check-up with tests for Alzheimer’s sneaked in. Maybe once we have established it medically, we can have some experimental therapy for her? My grandma had Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s—so maybe she had Lewy body dementia. 🤔 It was so hard seeing her like that…at the end she was like a doll just staring at the ceiling. Not really here and her body was just a shell.

Maybe that’s why my mom’s death wish was to be in the field, even though she was always at risk of getting Covid, which was how she got Covid in August. She didn’t want to go the way my grandma did.

For now, we will take one step at a time.

I would have to make breakfast and work because no other editor is on duty today. Have my cats around while I work my butt off.

This was my mistake. I cooked a lot of chicken when my kids had a late breakfast today. 🤦🏻‍♀️

They’re now stuck in my fridge for breakfast tomorrow.

For dinner, we drove several towns over for my mom’s birthday. For the ambience.

Tomorrow I will be off to PGH again for the MRI docs, interview, and scheduling. I hope I can wake up early enough so I won’t get stuck in Saturday morning traffic. Weekends are such a drag nowadays…Metro Manila streets are still clogged.