Waiting

You know what you want to do when you're facing round two of cancer and you feel so bad you're comparing it to how you felt on chemo last time?

Wait.

Wait for tests
Wait for results
Wait for appointments
Wait for more tests
Wait for more results
Wait at the ER
Wait wait wait

So my mom's oncologist appointment was cancelled because they didn't have all the results back from her biopsy, but they had to have gotten some of them back because they scheduled her for a bone marrow aspiration last week. That's a clue, because the insurance wouldn't have paid for the procedure without cause, which means the results they did have weren't good.

She goes back this Wednesday for all the results. We already know the cancer is back. Mom feel awful. She can't eat; she's lost weight; she sleeps a LOT. We went up to see her for a day this weekend and she couldn't hardly play with the kids, which is the opposite of my mom.

On her last visit to the ER she overheard the doc saying "Hodgkin's lymphoma." Last time around it was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma of the thyroid. This time they are looking at her liver. I'm praying they didn't find anything in the bone marrow.

We will all be super relieved to have an official diagnosis and treatment plan. The waiting sucks. It's been over a month since she first called her oncologist to schedule the PET. It's been three months or more since she started suspecting her cancer was back. It's been seven months since she started getting sick again. It's time to get this party started.

Mittens

Things we tried to name our kitten which were vetoed by my daughter:

Perry the Platypus

Daisy

Ketchup

Figaro

Kaycie

Necromancer

Crookshanks

Dalak

K-9

Phineas

Ferb

Gerald

Clover

Darkness

There are things I can't talk about in the daylight.

Like how my mom's cancer is back.

But it's dark and I've been awake since 3am anyway.

She was declared cancer free for 5 years this past December. She started getting weird fevers and illnesses in January.

Last week she had another PET scan that showed two suspicious areas, one near her liver and one near the spleen.

This week they are doing the biopsy and getting results on Friday.

But everybody has already moved past that and started thinking about treatment. Even her oncologist, who is basically waiting to see which type of cell it is to determine what's next.

I don't want her to have to do this again. It's too much. And it's not fair.

And I can't think about it because if I do I'm afraid it'll crush me.

And now the sun's coming up so I have to pretend it's not happening again and hope I sleep tomorrow night.