The following is an email that I sent out Monday morning, March 19. That was a month ago. It was 9 a.m. when I sent this to a handful of friends as a small update on what was going on with Mom. It was just an hour or so after that I received Mom's last phone call, asking me to come to the hospital.
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Dear Friends:
This is going out to a handful of folks (like six) that I wanted to keep updated on my mom's condition and what's going on with my family. I thought that I'd keep track of my thoughts on this and share them with you in the email as, I guess, this is a bit too personal for the blog.
Steve
My mom has been looking progressively worse when I've seen her. It's not that there aren't parts of this stream that double back - she was in reasonably good spirits on Saturday night - but it seems to keep moving forward.
Mom - Carol to the rest of you - has stage four adenocarcinoma. Four out of five. I'm making the distinction because it seems that there are two ways of scoring cancer - 0-4 or 1-5 and a bunch of substages within. I don't know which substage her cancer is in. Suffice to say that she's pretty sick and could die tomorrow or could get a few more years. I don't think she'll get another decade, but one can hope. I guess I'll take whatever I can get and she will, too. Right now I'd be really happy if she lives to see Uly's first birthday. She deserves to hear him say, "Grandma."
Mom has been sick now for about a month. Rather, I should say, the cancer has been recognized for that long. She admitted herself to the hospital a month ago because she had a blood clot in her leg. While in the hospital for the clot, the doctors found that her kidneys and liver were operating at about 60 percent capacity. They thought this was due to blood pressure. Mom also had six liters of fluid in her abdomen. This was the reason she had been out of breath and had trouble eating in recent weeks. They drew out the fluid with a needle. (Her friend Mary called this, "Tapping the keg.") The fluid had cancer cells in it.
Mom told me she cried when she first heard the word. It took her several tries to be able to say it and several more days before she would tell me and Becky. "I didn't want to tell you this over the phone..." But, she told us, she was going to do whatever the doctor said and she wasn't afraid to die.
Mom left the hospital last week and had a difficult time at home. A hospital bed in the living room, a new lift chair and help of friends was not enough to keep her at home. She was too weak to get around - even around the house, so she checked herself back into the hospital on Friday.
The cancer is probably ovarian, but testing continues. It is being treated with Taxol, which is the strongest chemotherapy drug they have. She had one treatment on Friday. I went to see her that day and she looked very weak. She couldn't get out of bed. I felt that she might die that day. My feelings may or may not correspond to reality and in this case, they didn't. When I visited her on Saturday she was still very weak, but in reasonably good spirits.
Mom told me that she loved me and Becky and Uly and that, again, she wasn't afraid of death, but wanted to live. She expressed some regret over some of her choices, but overall she was at peace. I spent two hours with her, showing her photos of Uly and telling her stories. She laughed a couple of times. When I left I felt renewed hope. We could hear another patient screaming nearby. My mom told me that she didn't feel that way. She was uncomfortable, but not in pain.
The pain came last night. Becky and I went to see Mom, who hadn't slept since before I saw her on Saturday. It sounded like she'd been up for 36 hours. She was in pain. More fluid in her abdomen, pressing against her ribs, lungs and organs. They finally gave her some morphine and she slept. She's sleeping now. Her blood pressure was low yesterday - 95 over 43 or something like that.
I called this morning. She was stable and asleep, which is why I'm here writing instead of there. More later.
Steve
