June 14-June22

After welcoming mom back to the waking after her surgery, we headed back home, 1.5 hours away from the hospital. Arriving home we were glad that everything went well with the surgery and mom was doing well and very alert when she woke up.

The next day was tiring at work, but calling down to the hospital it was discovered that she was doing well and recuperating at a very quick pace. Friday the 15th she was moved out of the ICU and had even taken a bit of a stroll down the hall. I had to work my weekend job so we did not go down to visit her until Sunday. We were planning to visit the following weekend, when her church was going to be holding a benefit breakfast to raise funds to assist mom during her time off from work.

Early the week of June 18 mom was not doing so well. On the 19th she did something I had never really heard her do before, she complained about how bad she felt. The doctors had found something amiss, her white blood cell count was up, and had been climbing since the day of surgery. They had ordered a regimen of tests, X-Rays, bone scans, and blood tests, and my mom was finding the whole situation absolutely exhausting. There were so many nurses and doctors in to see her that she had no idea how many, much less who, she had seen.

Now please understand mom is good with names and people and such. She keeps telling me about the lives of people I met, once, fifteen years ago, their trials and tribulations. Then she will ask me about college and high school acquaintances that she meet at graduation, or saw in my yearbooks and wants to know how they are doing.

This was an issue, she was loosing strength, the doctors kept taking her off of the liquid diet and relying on getting her nutrition through her I.V.

On Friday the 22nd of June I got a call that I was not expecting. My mom's friend Lee Ann called and left me a voice mail on my cell phone saying I should call her back as soon as possible. I immediately left the office and called her back. My mom had been diagnosed with bone cancer. The bladder cancer had spread, and was all over her body in her bones. The only treatment was chemotherapy. The only way to even consider this was for my mom to recover from the surgery she had on the 13th. Things appeared dire. We made the decision to head down to the hospital that evening and spend the weekend in town, getting things ready for the inevitable.