The Many Meanings of "Tired"

Although I am supposed to be finishing my internship at the Cleveland Clinic this week, I hit my breaking point earlier this Monday and made the ultimate decision to end it prematurely. From the last post where I was taking my mom to the ER, one of my biggest worries came to life. Because her blood cells bottomed out because of chemo, she was susceptible to infection, and we have been so lucky thus far on this journey that I guess I counted that possibility out. But I should have kept alive rule number one in the guidelines of a sick loved-one: Always be ready for the worst.

Mom has pneumonia, c-diff, a staph infection in her PICC line, and her kidneys are taking quite a beating from all the chemo. And we're only two and a half weeks away from her bone marrow transplant.

She is so tired of being in the hospital, and it's really starting to take its toll on her. Any bit of news that's even the slightest bit negative is throwing her into tears and episodes of complete anger, and I feel so sad for her. My heart is so tired of this, so tired of picking up the pieces of her heart when mine is barely hanging on anymore. I just wish this all would end, just would go away and life would keep going where we all left off. Little problems seem like nothing anymore, and everyone that has the nerve to complain about them in front of us seems like such a joke, such a selfish, self-centered joke. I would give anything for this to not be happening. We are all so tired.

Sometimes I wonder why this even happened in the first place. I try to think back to the time, the day before we found out, before we ever heard the word "leukemia." My aunt Polly was slowly dying, and we were all preparing. I was exhausted, trying to maintain normal chores around the house, graduate school work, a thesis, and a full-time internship at a long-term care facility, all while trying to not lose my mind and my sanity from my heartbreak about facing the approaching death of my closest aunt. I kept thinking, "I can't believe this is happening. Life is hard enough." Sometimes I wonder if this is all a cruel, sick joke for thinking that life is already hard enough. Kind of like when you do something stupid when you're little and your mom yells at you because you're crying and you shouldn't be, and she says, "Oh, I'll give you something to cry about!" I wonder if there's some type of connection with this. I just kept thinking, "Life is hard enough already. God, I'm so tired of this, I'm so tired."

My mom was growing tired of work, tired of her and my dad's house, tired of her routine: work, laundry, dishes, cooking, more dishes, bills, errands, work, etc., and she often said so. "I just am so tired of all this." With her sister dying from an illness she herself once had 8 years ago, I'm sure the thought scared her much more than their other sisters who had never had to experience such a thing. And while being so tired of her routine and from becoming so burnt out of life's nonsense, these things that aren't fair and we shouldn't have to deal with, when life is already as hard as it can be and there's no light at the end of the tunnel, or so it seems, she wonders, just like all of us, "How much more can one person take? Can one family take?"

Well, we got our answer.

Sometimes I wonder if this happened because we seemed to be challenging life, egging it on, so to speak. "I can't do this anymore, I'm so tired. Life is so hard right now, I don't think I can take much more." Maybe we asked for it. Maybe we pushed it over its limit. "Oh, I'll give you something to really cry about then..." Of course, the saying "Be careful what you ask for" comes to mind.

I'm sure this all sounds very anti-Christian and very negative and cynical and whatever else you care to throw in the mix. But I think, at one point or another, every person that is faced with this type of life stress, whether it be yourself or someone very dear to you like a parent or sibling, you have to ask yourself: "Isn't this hard enough already? Why now? What did I do?" So I must pose this question..."Are you really that tired?" Sure, you have kids to look after, dishes to do, a house to care for, work to be done, bills to be paid, maybe a little fender bender last week or a bounced check, a challenging class or a disagreement with a boss, maybe? But really, in hindsight, is it all that bad? Of course, these questions we ask ourselves and the hypothetical questions we pose to God like "What else could possibly go wrong?" aren't really meant to be answered, but unfortunately, sometimes, it is frightening how as soon as you truly start to wonder, something happens that suggests that maybe someone, or something, is just waiting for those little words to be thrown to the void. Just sitting there, ready to pounce. It doesn't care if you're tired, or that your aunt is already dying, or that your daily schedule is already starting to take its toll. You whine, you get what you asked for.

How terrible of me to think about this this way. But I'm sure I'm not alone, I'm sure there are many people who feel the same way. Otherwise, that saying "When it rains, it pours" wouldn't mean anything to anyone. And I'm sure when these people are challenged in some way, they can't help but ask the same questions. I'm sure what we were doing wasn't wrong and didn't render some thunderbolt from the sky that began the process of acute leukemia in my mom's blood. Obviously not. Is it a bad thing to be tired of life? Not just life in a general sense, but life's daily annoyances and challenges that people are faced with everyday? Does that make you a bad person, or a weak person, or someone who doesn't know how good they have it? I'm not sure. All I know is that I was already tired, and my family was already tired, and my mom was already tired. We were all dealing with alot at the time, and probably all wondering the same exact thing. "I'm so tired of all of this. How much more can we take?" I hate that that question was answered for us, and in such a terrible, terrible way. And at the worst time we could have ever begun to even fathom. I will never understand such things, my mind will never wrap around any of these concepts.

But I do know that I am tired of my heart feeling like this, and I am tired of watching my mom struggle through chemo treatments and now infections from chemo, and I am tired of coming home to a house without her here, and I am tired of going to school and being away from her, and being distracted by thoughts of her at the hospital, sitting there and hoping for a happy distraction from her life's realities. Things that make her tired. And more importantly, I am tired of listening to people complain about very small, petty things, things that mean nearly nothing in the larger scheme of things. My hope is that after you read this, after your coffee spills all over your pant suit for work in the morning, you do not say, "How much more of this can I really take?" or "I'm so tired of this!" Trust me, this is not being "tired." "Tired" is my mom sitting in her hospital bed for weeks at a time, wishing she was in Hawaii, or Disney World, or in Texas with her best friend, anywhere but where she is. "Tired" is having 5 chemo treatments, with no hair, no eyelashes, no eyebrows, no energy, in complete exhaustion. "Tired" is having to watch all of it and pretending like everything is fine. Most people do not know this type of tired, and I hope they never will.