Hello everyone,
It is so hard to put into words what I am feeling. Cancer is not "new" to my family. Both parents have had lung cancer in the past, they both had operations to take it out, and no further treatment was deemed necessary by their doctors. I have a sister who had a mastectomy and chemo at the age of 32 from breast cancer, and my other sister and myself both had cervical cancer which was treated with leep procedures.
My Mom just had her 2 year checkup from her cancer Doctor and she got a clean bill of health. But she has not been feeling well for over a year. She went to her regular doctor so often, that he told her to "get over it". He did have x-rays taken because my mom said she wanted them. The x-ray came out fine. A week later she insisted on more x-rays, which annoyed her doctor to no end, And she told him that maybe she had cancer again, he told her she was healthy, it was all in her mind. This x-ray showed an enlarged heart, so more tests were run. After numerous test came out fine, her cat scan showed stage 4 lung cancer. The doctor told her there was nothing he could do for her. We had the worst week of our lives. Constant sobbing, Mom screaming, kicking, begging. Wanting to kill herself. Then she went to a few more doctors before deciding on one that she liked. This new doctor told her she would not die from this.
My mom is now on chemo and radiation, she just spent the weekend in the hospital because her white blood cells are not cooperating and she was dehydrated. Her cancer Doctor told her that they can contain her cancer, But when my father and I questioned him as to what we could expect as far as treatments, he told us we could expect to have her around 6 months to 2 years. We stood frozen. That was not the question we had asked, And it was not something my Dad wanted to know.
So in a round about way, the doctor told us that she is terminal, but yet she does not know this. We are an extremely close family. We all live together, grandparents, their kids, and their kids. Mom likes to refer to us as the Walton's. None of us can imagine life without mom.
We keep waiting for the ball to drop, dreading the moment when the doctor tells her that there is nothing he can do.
People live everyday with the loss of a parent, but to me, it's incomprehensible. We have been going about our lives like there is nothing wrong with mom, trying to pretend it's not all about to change forever. I try to be stone faced all through out the day, because I feel like if I let the smallest amount of emotion out, I will go berserk. I want to rip the house apart with my bare hands, I want to scream. I want to wake up from this nightmare.
What happens now? How does mom go from the beautiful woman she is now, to where they tell us she's headed?
