Cross Your Fingers

Today. Mom’s last chemo treatment is today. The. Last. One. Of course, they won’t tell her that and let her have cake and go to the mall. The oncologist has to clear her, she has to have tests done, she hasn’t crossed the finish line yet.

We are all hoping beyond hope that the journey that started here ends today.

A year and a half of chemotherapy has taken its toll on my poor Mom; she suffers a hardcore case of chemo fog (and she was kind of absent-minded to begin with) and her heart is weakened. The doctor has ordered her to sit down and rest whenever her heart rate is elevated. She has some eyelashes and eyebrows, and has even accumulated enough hair on her head again to start playing with a post-cancer coloring routine.

Self-exams and mammograms have been all over the news lately. I feel pretty strongly about early detection. Mom went in for her routine mammogram (she is well over fifty), and they spotted an inflamed milk duct. She had a biopsy, and it came back malignant. She was told she needed a simple lumpectomy and six months of chemo, that it was a non-invasive cancer and she would be fine. During the specialized MRI she was given so the surgeon could map the lumpectomy, someone noticed that her lymph nodes were inflamed. Another biopsy was ordered, and the results of that biopsy revealed a nasty, invasive cancer- HER2 positive breast cancer. Her lumpectomy was upgraded to a double mastectomy, and her chemotherapy went from six months to a year and six months.

After the mastectomy, they searched the removed tissue for a mass. There was no mass. They caught it so early that a mass had not yet developed, and she was diagnosed as stage 2. She actually had two different kinds of cancer; one that would have taken a long, long time to get the best of her, and a silent killer. That mammogram saved my mother’s life.

Regardless of your opinion on the proper starting age for mammograms, regardless of the effectiveness of self exams, for me it boils down to this:  if early detection saves just one life, that is more than worth it.

In regards to my previous post, in which my mother’s words haunt me in my pre-dawn panic attacks, I just want to state what I thought was pretty obvious. Of course she never meant for her message to be as twisted or as powerful as it was. My anger and frustration was directed more at myself. The time has passed for blaming anyone else for, well, anything really. The time has also passed for allowing those old haunts and hurts to get the best of me, so when it happens, I’m less than pleased with myself for allowing it. Yes, my Mom is crazy. Yes, I am crazy. Yes, we love each other.

With that out of the way, then, let’s all take just a minute to hope and wish as hard as we possibly can that Mama’s status switches from cancer patient to cancer survivor soon.

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