It Begins Again

My mom has lung cancer.

Sounds simple and to the point, doesn't it? Well, I don't think it is quite that cut and dried.

On November 20, 2009 my Dad called. He said he was taking my Mom to the hospital. She was disoriented and he was worried. It turns out he was worried with good reason, but we didn't know what that reason was.

In the Emergency Room (ER), the staff did a chest X-Ray and a CAT scan of Mom's head. These are normal tests, and all along we were expecting that the result would be a stroke or mini-stroke, based on her symptoms.

We were shocked when the ER doctor came into the room and stood inches from my Mom's face and pronounced in a loud, clear voice that they were looking at metastatic lung cancer that had spread to the brain.

Mom, Dad, and I were stunned.

Mom had no symptoms. None. Zero. Had it not been for the disorientation, we would have probably not found out about this until who knows when. She also never smoked or had any of the other common risk factors for lung cancer.

She was admitted to the hospital and thus began a litany of tests, scans, and procedures.

The main procedure was the biopsy of the tissue in the lung. That would tell us many things, including the type of cancer that she has. So, on Monday, November 23rd the biopsy was done.

It was determined that she has adenocarcinoma. This was a small relief, as we were very concerned that she would be diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer. Small-cell is very aggressive and can be one of the exclusionary factors when being considered for clinical trials.

Other scans and tests revealed that the cancer had spread and was affecting several different parts of her body.

 The title of this post is "It Begins Again." More on that later, but suffice it to say that this family has had an intimate and devastating prior experience with cancer. I really thought that after that, we might get a pass. I guess not.

I will try and keep this up to date, more as a therapeutic exercise and record of what happened than anything else.

If you happen to have found this and read it, and would like to leave a comment please feel free to do so. If you know my Mom (having been directed here) and would like to leave her a message, I will make sure she gets it.

Her main approach to all of this is that she wants to win. She is in good spirits, healthy, and wants to fight. So we will fight. Hard.