My Everest…

Processing all of this information from the Dr. is hard. As I speak to my mom about certain things i can feel flare bear piling on the bricks.   How high?  Ask him, maybe he is building the CN tower or his own skyscraper dedicated to all things flare bear. My mom got her diagnosis from the Dr’s at the cancer clinic.   Turns out that she has metastasized kidney cancer growing inside of her pancreas. The tumor is bigger than a golf ball and now pressing into her small intestine it has also gone into her lungs. Right now the priority and focus for them is the pancreas and they are not going to do anything with her lungs. They gave her some options surgery, radiation therapy and chemo, lastly was to do nothing.  As I think about the options set forth to my mom by the Dr. I realize quite quickly that she is in an impossible situation. If she does nothing they told her she will have a painful death.  

If she has surgery on this beastie of a tumor, she will have a very long and painful recovery and probably need radiation afterwards and be tied to the cancer clinic.  When she looked at the people in that situation she said to me she doesn’t want that! The radiation part that is.  The other option presented to her was radiation therapy but they cannot give her full doses as  the location of the tumor is close to the duodenum and  higher doses could rupture her spleen.  Chemo was very briefly mentioned but not even discussed.  The Doctors were pushing to have another consultation with the surgeon that would present his suggestions as to how surgery on her tumor would look.  In the meantime we wait again and try to weigh her options.   But it’s so hard to be hopeful when you sit back and think about it…yes they can do all these things to help you but the one thing they cannot prevent is metastasis.   Here is a definition of metastasis

Metastasis: The spread of cancer cells from the place where they first formed to another part of the body. In metastasis, cancer cells break away from the original (primary) tumor, travel through the blood or lymph nodes.

That being said the cancer is free flowing in her body and can attach itself to another place at any time.  So she is damned if she does anything and damned if she doesn’t.  Me being the pragmatic one is pointing all of this out to her.  As I don’t think she has realized that whatever route she takes she still has cancer in the end.  I feel horrible doing it but she needs that part to sink in.   It finally did after a few days she told me she understood what I was getting at. Whew glad I didn’t have to do it again as I was already accused of wanting her to die.   No one wants her to die but at the same time no one is pointing out what needs saying.  So once again I am wearing the meanie hat. This is FUCKED!!