You know how people say no news is good news? Well not this time. I couldn’t write anything because we had devastating news yesterday. The pathology on the tumor came back and it is Grade 4 Glioblastome Multiforme. Pretty much the worst possible results. Don’t bother to google it. It made me want to throw up.

We walked in to mom’s room feeling pretty good yesterday evening. It turns out that in the few hours I was at home doing laundry and running to her house to pick up this that and the other, her radiation oncologist (or is it oncology radiologist?) came in and gave her the results of her biopsy. This is not even close to what I expected to hear. I was so busy thinking she was gonna be the lucky one that didn’t have cancer, it never occurred to me that it might come back at Grade IV. (This is contradictory to my normal prepare for the worst, hope for the best mentality. That should have given me a clue that a sucker punch was in my future. I digress…..) I have learned that when cancer is in the brain it is rated by grade, everywhere else it is by stage. Same difference. It’s bad.

I got up after four hours of sleep following an evening of having a lot of Jack Daniels and a couple of pretzels for dinner. Rick and I sat on the patio planning how we are going to deal with all of this. Should we move in to a house on one level, should we build a guest house, will she regain her independence at some point? Yes, Lauri, we are over-thinking it. I got up and made mom the liverwurst on rye, that only my mom would request for breakfast at 8 a.m. I stopped at Basha’s to pick up an iced caramel macchiato that she has recently developed a great love for. I feel I may have still had an elevated blood alcohol level at this point. Oops. Will try to avoid that kind of risky behavior in the future. Probably. After doing my mom’s toenails-she wanted to try purple for something new, my mom’s friend Toy kicked me out and told me to go home, so I left. Walking down the hallways of TMC is starting to feel like I’m walking through 3 feet of water. Weird. This is the first time I have had in in my house alone in over a week. It feels good to not  hear my voice or any other voice for a little bit. I have gotten to the point where hearing my own voice makes me want to scream. My recently acquired vocabulary sucks. Glioma, astrocytoma. Shit.

So, now we have to pick ourselves up off the floor and move forward and hope like hell that we can eradicate the cancer from my mom’s body. My wish for her is to be free of cancer, and to continue to live as long as possible and enjoy her life and experience all that she wants to experience with the same gusto she has always had. She deserves it. I love her so much.