Some things you just never expect to hear...

About a week or so before Thanksgiving my mom, who lives alone in a row home in Hampden, was walking down her steps. She was wearing socks, and this coupled with the hardwood steps made her slip, and tumble down to the bottom. She actually ended up dislocating her shoulder. Now, she dislocated her shoulder previously in her life when she slipped on some ice, and I have heard that once it happens, it is more prone to happen again. Well, needless to say, she was alone lying at the bottom of her steps in some serious pain. According to her, she picked herself up, limped over to her couch and sat down. Luckily her cell phone was in her pocket, so she mustered up enough strength to call 911. Then, once the call was completed, she picked herself up again and walked to the front door to unlock it, and then walked back to the couch to wait. It's funny how the easy things like making a phone call or unlocking a door can be so tough when you have an injury like a dislocated shoulder. Soon thereafter she was taken in an ambulance to the hospital, and they put her shoulder back into place and all was fine... at least we thought.

So, normal protocol is for her primary care physician to do an Xray on her shoulder to see if there was any ligament damage from the fall, so he did. There was no damage to the shoulder, but there was something that showed up and was puzzling: two lumps in her lungs. A PET Scan was needed before anything could be determined, but this news was not favorable to my mother or the rest of our family. So, she had the scan and then had to wait about a week to find the results. It was around the holidays, but I think the waiting was not abnormal. Well, my mohter had to suck it up for Thanksgiving and try and have fun. She did, and we all had a wonderful holiday at Rachel's parents house.

Well, the next week or so she found out that she actually had Stage 3A Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. We were all taken aback. My mother is not and had never been a smoker. She is one of the healthiest people I know. Why her? The only connection would be my dad who was an avid smoker from the day my parents met till about 15 years ago or so (roughly the first 10 or so years of their marriage... they are no longer married).

Well, the news was just so unbelievable, and something that you just never expect to hear. It almost seemed like it was all a dream and that at any moment I was going to wake up. Or maybe it was a bad April Fools joke and that someone would let me in on it soon. Nothing like that happened. It was reality.

Well, over the next month or so we all spent time together and supported my mom. On New Years Eve Day, my sister and I went with her to her first consultation at Johns Hopkins, the place where she will be starting her treatment. We met with the doctor and he seemed fine. Kind of doom and gloom though, but it's not a doctors job to be emotionally involved with a patient. During the consulation, we found out that the cancer was actually in her bloodstream because it actually had spread. Not good news. It seemed like the doctor thought we already knew this information, which was not the case. When my mom got home, she decided to email the doctor and ask that if it was in the blood, then how could it still be Stage 3A? He responded saying that it is in fact in Stage 4. News to all of us.

My mother is the strongest person I know, and is continuing her strength through this all. She does live alone, which makes it hard on her (and us). But, she is not letting this get her down, still going to work, still going out on the weekends... still living her life. She starts chemo in the next week or so, and will be getting a full body treatment intravenously.

It's going to be a tough next few months, but the support we give to her and the strength she emits will be some of the best medicine. Some things you just never expect to hear...