So Tired Lately

Monday September 9, 1991

Gene's actual birthday today!

Frank gets up early by the alarm and heads for Lemona. I sleep in til 8:30. Don't know why I'm so tired lately. It's starting to bug me. I seem to need 10-11 hours of sleep of late. Can't stay awake much past 9 p.m. Tonight is the first class for square dancing where we'll be "Angels". We're looking forward to it. Marty and Cathy and Robbie and Dolores will be there. It should be great fun!

I stay home today to wash and clean. It's nice not going to the valley.

My hair is so thin I can hardly manage it today. Seems like it's getting worse. Some thinning is chemo. Breakage and short hairs are probably perms and bleaching. No perms for awhile. Hopefully it will get better now that chemo is finished.

I can see why mom would be tired keeping up with her fast past while undergoing chemotherapy. I'm glad to see she's finally getting some sleep. If she is managing to go square dancing she can't be all that weak!

I have the same hair as Mom, thin, baby fine, and straight as a stick! Mom gave me perms from the time I was a toddler to give me some body and curls, and I continued to get perms well into my 40s, but found I could never perm and color, as there was just too much breakage. In fact, I remember the last time mom gave me a perm my hair broke off where the bands came in contact with my hair and it took months for the damaged broken hair to grow out. Now I keep it short, unpermed and highlighted with blonde and copper highlights. I remember Mom spending 30 minutes on her hair every morning while we visited in the huge master bathroom of her Simi Valley home. She would use a curling iron all over her head, then backcomb to give it some lift and finally spray with loads of hairspray that made us both cough. Sometimes I wonder if all those hydrocarbons she breathed every day for years are what gave her cancer. Even when we were camping, she put on makeup and fixed her hair every day.

A Cure For What Ails You?

Tuesday May 7, 1991

Sleeping til 8 a.m. lately, making up for lost sleep fropm 2-4 a.m. each night, I guess. Feeling more energetic and less arthritic than usual. Not allowed to take Motrin for my arthritic knees, thumbs, shoulders, neck and back, but that all seems to bother me less than a few months ago, another reason I'm feeling so well. Haven't noticed any hair loss. My bladder hasn't performed so well in months. A trip to the bathroom every 2-3 hours seems quite normal. Bowels are working perfect also. Even my allergies and cough have subsided.

Tonight we have Robbie and Dolores and Shirley and Jim over to meet. They are going to Alaska in their RVs and share information. Maybe they will see each other there. They seem to like each other. We pig out on angel food cake, strawberries and whip cream. All diet, of course.

OK, I have never heard of chemotherapy being a cure for arthritis, allergies and a cough! Mom had frequent pain in her shoulders and had cortisone injections several times. She had orthoscopic surgery on her knees a few years earlier, and every morning she woke up with a cough. Not sure what she was allergic to. She hadn't smoked a cigarette in 25 years.

PoPo

Grandpa met Flo in California. She was a salesgirl of 35 in a fancy ladies ready-to-wear. She'd never been married, so never did have any children of her own. After all raising Daddy was a new experience and then there were always the times they had Ila. Life turned around for Grandpa with Flo. She made a real successful businessman out of him, from used cars to real estate he always did well. In their later years, they did a lot of fishing, especially in Arkansas where they loved to drive. They also loved baseball and having me come to visit when school let out for the summer. Mother would put me on a bus. The driver would take me to Los Angeles and drop me off with instructions to get on the streetcar. At the end of the streetcar ride waited by grandpa and PoPo. I somehow made Po out of Flo when I was little and she was forever my wonderful PoPo until the day she died from a broken hip back home again in Boise, Idaho. My summers at Grandpa and PoPo's were full of baseball games, shopping for me, fishing and Grandpa making popcorn in the evening. Popo loved to curl my very short hair with her curling iron and I loved sleeping in the big bed in the spare bedroom with the pink satin comforter.

I thank God Mom had PoPo in her life, someone who would treat her special and take her shopping when her own mother made her wear feed sacks to school and loved her beer more than she loved her children. Mom loved PoPo and went to visit her in Idaho many times when I was a girl.
When I was 12 years old Mom took my brother and I on a Greyhound bus to Boise and we spent a week with PoPo. That was quite an adventure. It was a 3 day trip. In the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere the bus hit and killed a horse. We had to wait for hours for another bus to arrive and take all the passengers on the Boise. The photo above was taken on that trip. From the left are PoPo, her sister Muriel, me and my brother Gary.

The last line of her entry brings tears to my eyes because mom always loved to brush my hair and curl it with a curling iron, even when I was well into my 30s. She gave me a permanent wave every few months when I was a little girl. One of my last memories with mom is brushing her hair in the hospital as she lay dying from cancer. As you can see in the photo above taken 3 weeks before her death with my stepdad Frank, she still had hair in spite of all the chemotherapy she had been given for 2 years, but as I brushed her hair in those last days, it came out in clumps in the brush. I cried.