A Sudden Trip to Perth

On Wednesdsay night caseopaya received the 'phone call that her mother, already in her eighties, had been diagonised with T-cell lymphoma, a type of cancer that is pretty much untreatable. By the following day work had been informed and by Friday we were in Perth for the coming week. We spent the weekend with family in their Mandurah holiday house and currently staying with mother-in-common-law in the southern suburb of Medina, doing what we can (and what she will allow us to do!) around the house, running errands, etc.

At the point of last week's 'phone call things did seem very grim. However a transfer to the Fiona Stanley hospital has seen a remarkable improvement in her symptoms, courtesy of a hefty dose of steroids. The hospital itself is quite a remarkable and impressive institution, located next door to my alma mater, Murdoch University. Once described a "nursery for left-wingers" with radical ideas about teaching (e.g., mature-aged students, distance education, Deans teaching first-year subjects etc) it really has proven itself over time.

In so many ways caseopaya's mother is quite a remarkable woman. Moving from Germany to Western Australia by herself in the 1950s with very minimal English, and bringing up three children after her partner died in an accident in the mid-1970s is evidence of a quiet determination that is not immediately obvious from her slight size and conciliatory demeanor where every third word is punctuated by a small laugh through a thin smile. From conversation it is evident that she is facing her own mortality in a practical sense without much fear, although in contrast to denominational Catholicism, she has made it quite clear that she does not want to suffer and has expressed support for volunatry euthanasia.