Over the past 16 months, there have been certain aspects of the situation that have been almost too coincidental to be true. The night my parents called the ambulance and got my mom to the hospital, a few things happened. First, it was the first time my mom had been to a hospital for herself since she popped out little ole me--how crazy, how lucky to have a solid 25 year track record, how scary to jump right into the ICU. Of course, there is always a plan and though I'm not someone who believes in cliches, like "Everything happens for a reason", someone was watching down on us as a kind acquaintance of mine from high school happened to be the nurse that was assigned to my mom on her day entering the hospital for her lengthy visit. This actually happened three times during her stay. The girl from my high school being her 1st ICU nurse. A parent of a child at the program I ran being the doctor who convinced the medical team at large to hold off on my mom's release for one day, the day that ended up being an emergency surgery. (I had actually helped this parent a year later not knowing it was the same generic name like "John Smith" and only later made the connection.) Finally, on my mom's last entry into the hospital in the ER this past November, my mom's nurse was the daughter of my elementary school art teacher. Somehow the degrees of separation provided a small blanket of comfort for my mother, which at the time meant the world to her and subsequently, to me too. I'm getting ahead of myself in the details.
The day that the team doctors gave us the official diagnosis. They used all these terms, medical jargon and trailed off about medicine, treatment and options. They were of course too smart for their own good. We were lucky in the sense that there was a resident who took note of this and spent the time to explain to us all the complications that had occurred and the proposed options for someone with Stage IV Ovarian Cancer. I highly recommend a notebook diary for each day your loved one is in the hospital to keep it all straight. For those of you who don't know, Stage IV is the worst stage of cancer you can have. My mom is pretty stubborn and when she puts her mind to something, she can overcome it. This was a fact, it wasn't just speculation. In addition, her blood sugars were a little less than 1,000. That's truly unheard of, people always try to correct me when I retell the story and I remind them that there are few things about medicine that I know, but I surely know my mother's medical history now and her blood sugars were in the 900's. It was bad to say the least. Finally, she also had pulmonary emboli-- clots in her lungs.
My mother and I are both logical people by nature and we took all the punches of the difficult news and went on to find out what options there were. Once they had regulated her blood sugars and her breathing, they could focus on the Ovarian Cancer. It was Labor Day Weekend that the most wonderful and truly loving surgeon came in from his family's BBQ and performed an emergency hysterectomy a week earlier than scheduled as the tumor had doubled in size right before my eyes. This is where the "doctor on duty turned parent I helped" came into play and listened to his patient and her daughter and called in the people he needed to. She had moved down to a normal floor the day before and then moved back up to an Intermediate Floor. The fluctuation was unreal. My aunt and dad had just left the hospital only hours before and I stayed behind and I truly wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Her lower abdomen became extremely enlarged and she was in excruciating pain. Again, we were blessed with one of those serendipitous moments. While we were waiting for a major decision to come about, we heard a group of people singing Happy Birthday to her "roommate". When I peeked behind the curtain, there were a group of 5 nuns celebrating the life of a blind nun who just turned 87. If that wasn't a true blessing, I don't know what is. The room was just filled with this incredible positive energy and a calm peacefulness.
After about two weeks of ICU living after a relatively successful surgery, complete with a breathing machine, and on my 25th birthday, September 16, she opened her eyes and without words, told me she was ready to fight this horrible disease that had taken over her life.
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