The "C" Word

Hey, dirty mind!

Cancer.

Oh, that "C" word. Yes, just as dirty, just as disgusting and tearing through our world and our lives. Yuck, what a piece of shit of a disease. Not that any disease is buckets of fun, but cancer just seems to be the crappiest because it goes anywhere and everywhere and they can't do much about it.... yet. This time its my mom dealing with it (along with millions of others, but I don't know them so I can't write about them).

It started with an ugly-ass mole on a forehead and ended up in the neck with thyroid cancer. Gee, those two things don't seem to be related? They're not, but that's how it was found. My mom had a mole quickly making itself known by growing out of her forehead like a unicorn's horn. She went to a dermatologist to have it removed and low and behold it had those little nasty cancer cells swimming around and screwing things up. So the doctor's decided some more testing was necessary and they were going to do that by taking a larger chunk of skin from her head. At the same time they were going to take a node out of her neck and her thyroid. I'm not sure how that decision was reached, but I'm assuming they did some test (an ultrasound or MRI or something along those lines) and saw a growth on her thyroid.

All did not go according to plan during surgery. The growth they had seen on her thyroid had wrapped itself around her trachea and when they were cutting it away they nicked her trachea. Damn. That sucks. So, a procedure that was supposed to be in and out turning into an ICU visit. They kept her sedated through the night and she was completely baffled the next day when she discovered most of a day had passed without her knowledge. They also still had the tube down her throat when I showed up at one o'clock in the afternoon. She was awake, choking and the doctor was no where to be found. The ridiculously understanding and nice nurse Jesse informed me that normal a tech could take it out, but since they had nicked the trachea during surgery they were being overly cautious and they wanted an anesthesiologist, a cardiologist and her surgeon present just in case anything went wrong and they had to put the tube back it. I understood that, but what I didn't understand was why the doctor wasn't coming now that she was awake. Shockingly the anesthesiologist was the first to show up (way to go guy) and the cardiologist was quick to follow. Then, forty-five minutes later, her doctor finally decides to amble his way up to the ICU (and no he didn't have a good excuse like surgery for why it took him forty-five minutes). They finally got the tube out of her throat and nothing happened, which is, of course, a good thing.

Final results finally came back and we discovered that the skin from her forehead was fine. The cancer hadn't gone into her lymph nodes and it seems all the cancer had been removed. Now, she has a "L" shaped scar right on her forehead, which she joked about in the hospital claiming that she was now officially a "Loser". The thyroid, however, had more cancer. Completely different and separate from the cancer that had been on her forehead. The whole thyroid had been removed, but they are going to be doing radiation therapy on her anyway. She has to completely change her diet. Apparently with thyroid cancer she cannot have any iodine in her diet for them to do the therapy. That translates into no iodized salt and no dairy. Holy crap, how much does that suck? Do you realize that damn near everything has salt in it? and in most cases that's the plain old iodized salt that she can't have?

Needless to say we are all still in the freak out stage of this mess, but we are figuring it all out and keeping everyone calm, especially my mom. I'm going to get her a bread maker so she can make her own salt-free bread and the online cookbooks have so many salt-less recipes that I have assured my mom that cooking foods won't be a problem. She is preparing for the fact that she will no longer be on her thyroid meds and therefore will be exhausted all the time and the fact that the radiation is going to leave a nice burn to go along with her choke scar from surgery. I'm trying to keep it light for her so she doesn't get depressed on top of all the other crap she's dealing with. I've already decided that she is going to be just fine and that I won't let her or anyone else say any different. It's three months of hell, but its not a lifetime and that's what matters, right?