Okay, just giving y’all a quick update on my mom. The official diagnose is “renal papillary carcinoma”; the tumor is about 2.6 cm big (that’s small; we’ve caught it at an early stage — good news). I’ve been looking at the survival rates 5 years out and things look pretty good. The one complication we’re running into right now is that they’d like to use cryo-ablation (freezing, minimally invasive surgery) to get rid of the tumor, but unfortunately, my mother’s spleen is “floppy” (damn floppy spleens, they’ll be the death of us all!), and it’s in the way. So they need to make a decision on whether they can do some cryo-ablation and some surgery, etc., how much, and so on, combined with targeted radiation, I believe. She has an appointment with her GP this Friday to start talking to the people involved in this, but also has a love affair with MGH and has been referring to CCH (Cape Cod Hospital) as “Podunk U” and saying things like, “You don’t take cancer to a bunch of idiots at Podunk U.!” (never mind that CCH is actually known at being better at cancer treatment than MGH, lol, that’s just my mom).
My task, at the moment, is to keep everybody focused on the next step, not worrying too much, and to keep everybody’s attitude right (positive). Because if we just get moving on this, we should be okay. *knocks on wood* So let me go make the rounds again and making sure everyone is watching sitcoms. 🙂