a good year..... a bad year

Here we were, having a good time, and getting farther away from brain tumors. We were having fun. Traveling, enjoying life. Even cognizant deficits didn't matter. Marie started to get pressure from her family. They would tell her things like, my friend so and so, knows someone who had a brain tumor, and their fine now, so why would you be having any problems.

What I believed I knew was, that there are many types of brain tumors. Some of which grow quickly, and some grow slowly. Sometimes there are variants of the same tumor. Sometimes it is a primary brain tumor, which starts in the brain. And sometimes, it is a cancer from another part of the body, that spreads to the brain. People react differently to their tumors. Many times it depends on the location in the brain. Different areas of the brain control different skills. It all seemed to make sense to me, but not to my wifes family. They just couldn't understand what was wrong with her.

Marie would talk to them on the phone, and she sounded so good to them. What they didn't seem to get was that she had learned how to pick up cues on the phone and answer question that would fool people. If you asked her, "are you cooking today?", she would answer, yes I'm cooking today. That was always a favorite question, because one of Maries cognizant deficits was, she no longer could remember the steps of cooking. Planning a meal, organizing the ingredients, or following a recipe. So if she said, yes I'm cooking today, then everything must be all better.

I would try to explain that Maries answers were not true. Her brain learned how to compensate for a deficit. She answered the way, she believed, she was supposed to. She wasn't really having a conversation with her family, she was just responding to their questions. It wasn't lying, she was just responding. I believed if they would have worded their question differently, she would have answered differently. If they would have asked, "you're not cooking today are you?" I believe she would have answered, "no I'm not cooking today."

They didn't get it and I couldn't convince them. We weren't arguing, but there was frustration.