Here’s a new one from titanium soul:
Just a short little piece that I was working with. It was actually inspired by a piece by Philip Sheppard from the Science Channel program “Moon Machines.”
In other (but maybe related news, now that I think about it…), my mom’s latest PET scan (no, not for the cat 🙂 ) came back negative for any sort of cancer or growths. Cancer free, baby!! Woo hoo! Obviously, that’s great news. The week before her scan, the doctor felt around her neck, which had been so swollen before, and couldn’t feel anything abnormal.
He said it was remarkable, given that her treatment had been so… oddball. Just to refresh, before she had discovered she had cancerous growths, she had been super dehydrated and unable to eat, so when they took her in they put a feeding tube in her just in order to get water and food into her. She already was very weak and had lost like, 60 lbs.
Then they found out that she had cancerous growths, one on her epiglottis and one in the side of here neck–which is why she couldn’t eat or drink without choking.
So the treatment program was several weeks of radiation, and three sessions of chemo. However, after getting home right right after her second chemo treatment, on the day before Thanksgiving, she had a heart attack.
Back in the hospital… her rads and chemo were suspended while she recovered from that, but then she had an episode of ventricular defibrillation. We had the defibrillator put in, but her heart was irritable, and she kept getting the **** shocked out of her, until they were able to get back in there and tune the defib to less sensitivity.
Once that was all stabilized, she got to continue the radiation, but the chemo was indefinitely suspended. She ended up not going back for that, as it was deemed too stressful.
Apparently, once you start radiation therapy, you only have so many weeks you can do it before the course has to stop, for safety reasons. So in order to get as much treatment in during the open window, they doubled up her daily sessions, so that she had two a day.
All this while, she was living in the hospital. Thanksgiving… Christmas… New Year’s… finally, the radiation course was over. They had been moving her from Acute Cardiac Care, to lesser and lesser intensive care rooms, ’til she was what was in basically a nursing home wing of the hospital, which amounted to a hotel where nurses would come in periodically to giver her medicine. At the same time, she was going through a light version of physical therapy in order to rehab her from the heart attack… and so much bed rest.
Finally, she got to go home in late January, and it was already noted how much her neck size had returned to normal, and she was back to eating some solid food and drinking fluids, though she still needed the tube in to get most of her calories.
So, a great big thank you to all friends and family who dropped by to see her, and for the doctors and nurses who treated her, and all the kind thoughts and prayers of all you who did so. And of course, to God and the Universe for her healing.
In that light, I think I’ll dedicate the above song to my mom, Sharon. May sunlight always break through for you!
Man... Or Amphibiman? 