Warrior Mother

I think I’ve said this before, and if I haven’t, I’ll say it now.

Cancer sure is sneaky.

Before I was diagnosed, I was sick for years and didn’t know it until a couple of persistent symptoms cropped up. One I ignored for some time because it mimicked another common health problem. One I didn’t because, OMG, LUMP! Right? What I thought was an enlarged “lymph node,” turned out to be a tumor, metastasized from the original. Because of that, I presented as a Stage IIIB right off the bat, and went on to the illustrious Stage IV.

Sneaky. Without a doubt.

February 19th was another day of reckoning.

That’s when my mother and I received the news of her own cancer diagnosis at age eighty-two.

It began simply enough. Some pain when swallowing that seemed to come out of nowhere in early January. She already had an appointment set up with her regular doctor for January 30th.

She said, “I’ll tell him about the pain then, if I even still have it. I probably just need my esophagus stretched. You know, so and so, and so and so have had theirs done.”

I thought, well, okay, maybe that’s it. I also thought her symptoms mimicked my husband’s. He has acid reflux, but, as long as he takes Nexium, he’s fine, otherwise swallowing dense food, like meat, potatoes bread, i.e., it’s the same as what she’d been having.

So, I bought her some of the over the counter stuff, and after a few days, she thought it might be working. Then, it wasn’t. By then, she wasn’t too far from her appointment, so she managed by finding things that were easier to eat. Finally, I took her to the doctor appointment, and she told him what was going on. Two days later, she was getting x-rays – which showed nothing. From there, he referred her to a gastroenterologist who ordered an endoscopy for February 19th.

The day of that procedure Mom was in good spirits, ready to get everything over with. It was all done pretty quick. The doctor walked into the recovery room while she was eating ice chips and I was dithering around on my phone.

He said, “Well, I know what’s wrong.”

I glanced up, and before I could ask him any questions, he said, “It’s a large mass growing into her esophagus. Cancer.”

Oh, how everything instantly changes when you hear that word. Every single thing about the way you think, the way you feel, the way you live from that moment on is altered. You know it, but none of it is solidified yet. The reality of it is still melding with you, and while you’re trying to cope with the word, physiologically your body reacts on its own. You were warm, and now you’re cold. You could breath and now you can’t. Your heart beats too quick, and tears fall, but neither of you notice any of these things.

Shocked, we could only listen to his next words carefully.

“We will wait on the biopsy, but I’ve seen plenty of these, and it doesn’t look good.”

What a sad ride home that was.

The next steps were to get a stent placed into her esophagus so she could eat. The gastro doctor was about to go out of the country for three weeks, so, on February 22nd, three days after the endoscopy, that was done. What followed was a rough, rough two weeks. The pain was intense as her body adjusted to this foreign tube stuck right into the middle of her esophagus and the tumor – which the doctor said looked pretty “angry.”

Somewhere between that, and the following weeks came a CT scan, a PET scan, meeting her oncologist, her mapping/planning with radiation oncology and the planning with her medical oncologist.

The surreal part of this? Her radiation oncologist is the same one I had, the same nurses – you remember these gals, right? I called them my angels back then and they haven’t lost those wings.

They’re still there, helping people fight.

Her battle begins tomorrow, April 4th at 10:00 o’clock a.m. when the ladies above will guide her through the treatments with expertise, care, and compassion, just like they did me. Directly after, she will walk across the hall to the medical oncology offices, where she will begin her chemotherapy at 10:45 .am.

She is receiving her chemo differently, and by that I mean once a week for six to seven weeks. I had the “pump”kin for a week at a time, twice. Remember it?

The “pump”kin. Ten days of hell, dosed out five days at a time.

She will have twenty-eight rounds of radiation.

Her attitude?

“I’m going to kick this thing of the way so I can keep going, so I can live! I’m going to fight like hell.”

Taken Monday at her house where she beat me twice in Scrabble.

Meet my warrior mother.