Is my mom lowering her expectations?

Question

She's still recovering from breast cancer treatments from 2018. She's been immobile since suffering an ankle injury in 2018 (no surgery needed). She hardly exercises at all. She uses a quote about chemo taking out both bad and good things in your body as an excuse not to exercise. She refuses to call the American Cancer Society for advice (side note, her oncologist died last month).

She thinks eating will get her energy up. She doesn't consult a dietician or nutritionist and leans on her (lacks of) understanding. She's out of bed less and less frequently. The number of times she needs help sitting up on the side of the bed outnumber the number of times she's out of bed. She use to get her showers twice a week but for the past seven months, it's been once a week.

She, from my perspective, has no motivation to get moving and get better and idk how to get her motivated and get her to raise her expectations without upsetting or belittling her.

Tarkarri · Answer

She has stopped trying.
Ideally she needs to talk to a therapist or similar. 
She needs to have purpose.
It may take you being "ill" or "injured" and "needing her to assist you" to get her moving again.
Perhaps you could "strain something in your back" or similar while assisting her. 
An "injury" that can heal quickly if needed and still allows you to do things despite the "pain" but may encourage her to feel duty bound to push herself to look after you.
It sounds sneaky, I know, but having gone through cancer treatment twice, I know that sometimes you just need a reason to push yourself beyond what you think you can do and the sense of achievement encourages you to do more.

Grace · Answer

It seems like she has given up on living based on what you have said. Honestly, I think that you need to upset her in order to get some sense knocked into her. My grandmother recently passed from cancer and she had a lot of chemo. For a while, she completely gave up on living her life. She stopped bathing, eating, and getting out of bed. It was hard to see her like that. My dad went and yelled at her to get it together. She still had a ton of time left in her but she was giving up. He basically told her that if she wants to live then she needs to take care of herself again. Not only was she hurting herself but she was hurting her family in the process. She had already lost time due to the cancer and treatments and then she was giving away her life in the process. She cried, my dad cried. She got it together again and got a lot better for like a year and a half before she passed. You may have to say some harsh things to knock some sense into her but she needs to hear the truth about how self destructive her behavior is and that it is also hurting you. It's hard but it must be done.

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Is my mom lowering her expectations?

2 Answers