mama

I am documenting what has happened the past month of my life so that I will always have a memory of my last few weeks with my mom. As I’ve written some tonight I’ve already had to go to Facebook and my phone to remember dates and time of things, so it’s a good thing I’m doing this. It’s mostly for me and my kids, but feel free to read along if you are curious what happened.

As most of you know, the 3 of you that read regularly, my sweet mama had been living with metastatic breast cancer for 5.5 years. I’ve posted about her often on here and in the beginning she and I both used to write at our other blog, kristascancerjourney.blogspot.com. She stopped writing about it a while ago. I never pushed her to keep writing. In a way I wish I would have, but that wasn’t her. She was a very private person, not one to put her whole life out there for others to read about. Maybe she didn’t think they cared to know. Man I sure do, I care to know. I care to know all of the things she was thinking and feeling that she never told me. I know - now that I am a mom – that she kept things from me, probably more than I will ever know.

I just found out that in the beginning when she was re-diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer – there is no stage 5 for those of you who may be new to cancer – her doctor gave her 2 to 10 years. She never would give me a timeline, no matter how many times I asked, which in hindsight, maybe I never asked that much. I guess I didn’t really want to know. I am glad that I didn’t know now that she’s gone. When it was time it just happened.

My mom went to the beach towards the end of last month. While she was at the beach she got sick. Really sick. Like throwing up all day long sick. Stay in the bed and not even sit on the patio to look at the water sick. She almost hung up on me once while we were talking because she was about to throw up.

When she got home from the beach she went to her doctor. Its funny when I think back to her telling me – Its probably an inner ear infection. Yeah ok mom. But that’s what moms do. We protect our kids. She was still protecting me even though I would turn 40 two days later!

Well it turns out she didn’t have an inner ear infection. Her cancer had spread to her brain and she had 4 nasty tumors. One of them needed to come out now.

Her tumor removal surgery was scheduled immediately – yep, you guessed it. My birthday! Wow, the timing on that one. But seriously who wants to celebrate turning 40 anyway?? So we spent all day on August the 1^st waiting for her to get out of surgery. She did. The surgeon said she did great. They got the entire tumor, he didn’t even come close to her hearing nerves, which he was worried about. He got all of it. Now she just needs to recover and radiation will take care of the other three. She was in the clear again! Yeah!

I went to see her in recovery, and she looked great. That was Wednesday. I went home. I came back to see her a couple days later on Friday. She looked amazing. You wouldn’t believe she had surgery. She was having a hard time eating bc she had some swelling on her throat but over all she was good.

Maggie and I came back on Sunday the 5^th.  Moms voice was really scratchy and Maggie was just unsure of everything. We visited for a while and then it was off to home it was our last week before kindergarten started for Maggie! We had a back to school bash with the neighbors on Monday, I got a call that my grandmother fell and broke her hip. Seriously?

To be continued…..