We got three good days before getting into the bad.

Mom had an appointment with her doctor this morning. He came in the room and pretty much stopped in his tracks, looking at her. But he wasn't just looking at the right side of her face.

I have to describe what was wrong first: Mom has scalp cancer. It started at what looked like a bruise on her head seven years ago. Since then it's been creeping downward. When we were here in November she had a black growth a couple of inches from her right eye. It was this growth they tried to zap with radiation back then. (Actually, they goofed badly; she had the radiation treatments too close together—'she should have had one or two a week; instead she was having them every day. It was this that messed up her eye and made it perpetually tear.) Last week she had the growth off. This made a horseshoe-shaped incision next to her right eye. The doctor also took three biopsies, one from her eyebrow, one from under her eyes, one from her right cheek.

The one from her cheek was negative, but the other two are positive.

If he has to remove the other two, she will lose the eye as well.

If that wasn't worrisome enough, he was also looking at the left side of her nose, where the tear duct meets the nasal bone. It was a bit dark there, but she has been rubbing at it since she came home from the hospital. I thought it might be irritated. It also doesn't seem to have changed since she came home from the hospital, at least to me. But he said it looked "different" from when he saw her in the hospital on Monday and took a biopsy for it there at the office. She has to go back next Friday for the tumor clinic as well.

We stopped on the way home to see my cousin Anna. We found her crying; her husband, Anthony, had a fall a few days ago and is still unconscious in the hospital after having surgery to take pressure off his brain. Anna is always the one who has helped take care of Mother and taken her to the doctor. But now she is at the hospital all the time. And she's in bad straits herself; she has colon cancer and it has probably spread.

And here sit I, stuck between a rock and a hard place. She needs someone to help her. If the eye goes, she won't be able to drive anymore. She can take the Transvan shopping, but basically will have to remain a lot of the time alone. In the house she can putter around, but she's still alone and it will become too much for her. But I don't want to have to leave her in a little "rat trap" apartment like my Aunty Terry had, a single room in a tall building, even more alone than if she had been in the middle of the wilderness.

So what do I do? My job is what supports my own medical problems and James'. There are no comparable places here, and what medical insurance is going to pick up the two of us, with past cancer, dicky hearts, allergies, acid reflux, diabetes, arthritis, and sleep apnea between us? (And who would buy that fool house? The HVAC system is dying and we already have two windows that have to be propped up with sticks.)

I'm stuck. She needs her doctors. I feel like I'm standing on the top of Everest and being asked to step off into space.

Nobody can tell me what to do. But what I need to know is what I can do...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 1:02:00 PM

Comments:

Dear Linda, know that you and your mom are in my thoughts and prayers. Stay strong. Best wishes, Robert.

# posted by  Anonymous : 11:17:00 PM

 

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