Mom and her cancerous lung

Even though Erin has talked me into posting on my site again to document what's going on, my heart isn't into it. Not lately anyway since mom went in for surgery.

Mom had been getting results back from her CT scans showing that she had a spot emerging in her lung for a couple years now. First it was just one spot that was too small to do a biopsy on, but then they did once it had gotten a little bigger and it turned out to be nothing. We all breathed a sigh of releif and tried to get back into the routine of our family's, friends and work. Another six months after that more spots showed up and they grew. Something like 10 of them in one lung. This time a new doctor wanted to have another biopsey done to see if it's a sarcoma. I still dont' know much about sarcoma's, even after scowering the internet. It's really vague.

Basically it's cancer, but it doesn't show up as cancer. When she had that tumor in her cervix almost 4 years ago, it appearantly grew these cells and sent them out through her blood stream. Like most things in her blood stream, they hit the dead-end of the capillaries in her lungs. From there they started to grow, and if left alone they would continue to grow into tumors that would eventually be inoperable. So, the surgeon decided to open her up and deflate her left lung and feel around for the little lumps and cut them out with a 'stapler'. He kept calling it that. I don't really want to know what it is.

So I took a day off to go into the meeting with Kim, Denny and Erin to talk to the surgeon and find out what is happening and what is going to be done. Everyone came out with their own conclusions on whether to think it's a good thing or a bad. I was feeling pretty down about it as the surgeon talked more and more. At one point Mom looked at me from her chair with a sad expression of, "This is killing you." I haven't seen that kind of expression on her since I was a kid, and my bird died. But I'm not a homo, so I didn't cry.

A few days later I took another day off to go to the surgery. I went with Mom and Denny to the hospital at five in the morning. She checked in, and after an hour wait, they took her to the prep room. Denny and I waited in the main lobby until they called us up. We sat by mom's bed as she waited to go into the O.R.. When we first arrived, there was a minister there by her bedside praying for her. For some reason I was pretty pissed to see that. Something about having someone praying over my mom in her hospital bed made the situation even more dreadful. I just wanted them to get the hell out and let us talk to her so we could all reassure each other that this wasn't as bad as it seemed. Denny and I held her hand, and tried to joke to lighten the mood. A nurse came in to do something, then an anesthesiologist, then the surgeon. Once she was drugged up they wheeled her off. It was weird not to stand and stare sullenly as they quietly took her away- like a scene from a Sunday night movie on the Hallmark Channel. I think Denny was doing the same, because the silence was broken when one of the nurses brought up the bag I was wearing. It has a buckle on the strap like you would see from a seatbelt from a car in the 70's.

Denny and I sat around talking about all sorts of stuff until Erin showed up. Then he retired to his magazines about hunting while Erin told me about Audrey and Margo's drop off at daycare. The time was ticking by pretty slowly. She was scheduled to go into O.R. at seven o'clock and be done at ten. We went to the cafeteria, and walked around. Thanks to the fancy iPod, I surfed the web and sent off some emails to people who wanted to know what was going on.

Sometime around ten-thirty she was finally out and in the 'in between room' that they had to monitor her and let her wake up from the anesthesia. I don't know how long it took, but eventually we were allowed up to see her. I was pretty tired since I hadn't slept the night before and was up so early. I would like to say that I was up because I was tossing and turning from worry, but in reality it started with that, and resulted in my getting heartburn from eating cashews until one in the morning. Anyway, since I was tired and groggy, I didn't really know what to expect, and wasn't adiquatly worried enough as I normally am about everything. So I kept reminding myself to prepare for the worst. I've seen my dad in the hospital for gall stones when I was a kid. It can be some pretty scary stuff.

Before we saw her the surgeon sat us down in a little room and told us how it went. Basically he flattened the lung and went over it three times before he finally closed her up. The initial biopsy confirmed that it was a sarcoma and not some friendly bacteria. I pretty much figured that was going to be the case, but it still felt weird hearing that. We all asked questions, and danced around the one we really wanted to know which was, "How bad is it? If they can't operate again how long would she have?" But no one asked. Though we all talked about it later. The doctor kept framing the experience as if it were some kind of computer virus. He would say in a calm, regretful tone of an IT person, "Yeah, these are buggers to get rid of." Then sit quietly. He also talked about how things like this are the burden of living. I should of been annoyed- like I was when the clergy person prayed over mom, but for some reason I wasn't. Probably because he wasn't being condescending, and was being matter of fact about a subject that he deals with all the time. I had overheard the conversation that another surgeon had with another family, and he treated the operation like a football game. Talking loudly and bluntly and without any emotion. You could almost feel that he was removing himself from that room as he spoke. Also, he had the door wide open so all the rest of us in the waiting area could hear. Pretty crappy. Luckily for us, our surgeon was quiet and respectful. He sat there patiently as we all reflected quietly. Erin said later that you got the feeling from him that he would of sat there all day until we let him go.

We finally got to see her and she looked fine. She was awake and chatting. She looked good and seemed in a pretty good mood. Pretty quickly after we had got in she asked what the verdict was. I told her and she thought about it for a second- staring off into a corner of the room. Then she didn't seemed too let down about it.

She had to stay in the hospital for five days after that, and we visited every night. On Sunday, when I was there I got a call from my friend Corey who wanted to stop over and say hi. So he met us down at the hospital and since mom had some other visitors, the two of us went down to the cafeteria to get something to eat. Erin showed up as we were leaving and said that she wanted to go back in to get some food. Lucky for us since we ran into Toby and her boyfriend in line. It was nice to all hang out and joke around. Even though we were the only ones laughing in the place. I'm sure we grated on everyones nerves.

I was pretty nervous about mom going home since she was going to be taken off the epidermal and put on regular pain killers. The doctors kept warning us that it could potentially be a really painful recovery. But she seemed to do pretty well. Or so she said. Actually she was in a lot of pain, and surprised the hell out of me when she broke down on the phone crying and telling me how bad it was. She's finally better now, and making trips out shopping for groceries (with Kim or Denny's help).

From here we wait until the next C.T. scan and see if any more nodules pop up in that lung that was just operated on. If there are none, they will operate on the other lung and then keep checking her. Hopefully she will be clear for years before they would have to operate again. But then there's always the possibility that the nodules will pop up again on this test, and they will advise against operating. Since sarcomas in the lung aren't supposed to respond to Chemo, or radiation there would be nothing we could do. So I'm pretty nervous.