Cancer

This past March 25th was a quiet Friday night spent relaxing at home. My mom, who is 70 had been ill with what my siblings and I thought was a nasty upper respiratory infection. She'd called her doctor a few times that week with various escalating symptoms and the feeling that she just wasn't feeling right. The doctor couldn't get her in and urged her to call back the following week. That evening, my sister and I convinced her that if she was feeling so badly she should go to her local E.R. My sister and I suspected it might be pneumonia. Mom went to the E.R., went through blood work and a chest xray only to have the doctor come back a bit later with the words "We've found a suspicious spot on your left lung. I've already contacted your physician and told him that you need to be seen immediately by a pulmonologist." Cancer was not mentioned by the doctor--although it's spectre was very large in my mom's head at that moment.
What followed over the next two months was a blur of appointments and consultations. Mom underwent a CT scan, a PET scan (which showed the spot lit up as well as a lesser degree of lighting in one lymph node) and then a few weeks later she underwent a bronchoscopy. That latter test involved biopsying that lymph node and it came back clean for cancer.
 On June 6th, Mom underwent major surgery to remove "Spot".  By that time Spot had grown from 2.8 to 3 centimeters. After the procedure, the doctor came and spoke to us in the waiting area and told us that he'd gotten it all to the best of his knowledge, that it was indeed cancer, and that he'd had to remove one entire lobe of the left lung as well as a wedge of the other lobe in that same lung. He'd also biopsied 11 lymph nodes and they subsequently came back negative for cancer! Now, Mom has to go back every 3 months for a chest xray and a medical appointment as well as have a scan done every 6 months. Her type of cancer is a Squamous Cell Carcinoma and it is considered a Stage 1b. The pathology report stated that it is poorly differentiated and that there were "extensive areas of tumor necrosis" present.
  Mom was in the hospital 8 days and is recovering at home now. But before all this, she and her husband were talking divorce so at her age, and now with a cancer diagnosis, she will be starting over at 70. This breaks my heart because I know her life has not been easy and for the longest time she's not been happy but just settled and accepted things as they were; being too afraid to change them.
 Now, it seems that cancer, HER impetus to make some changes in her life --has become one of my own. I don't want to let more years go by existing. I want to do whatever I can to make life fulfilling --for myself as well as those I care about.
 One of the things I will be doing for Mom via this blog and other methods is raising funds for not only her medical expenses but to start her new life over closer to her family. (She lives in another town but the same state as we do.) One of the ways I will do that is accept donations via paypal under the name azureseaglass@yahoo.com.  We'd greatly appreciate any donations and you can know that any monies will indeed go to what I've stated here. In fact, we will likely be starting a bank account for folks that might wish to contribute in that way. More on that later.
 All I know is that as hard as it is sometimes, life is precious and it goes by so very quickly. If you pray, please keep my mom in your prayers as she recovers from her surgery and faces the weeks and months ahead!