Trip to FL

Hey Everyone

Tygana's Mom here.

I hope you all had a wonderful easter weekend! I'm hoping to get back into my blogging state of mind this week because I really do miss it.

As for my trip back home, well here's the story. (caution it's pretty long!)

I left for home on the 18th I arrived around 11pm. My brother picked me up at the airport, we had dinner and called over to the hospital to see if my Mom was awake or not, she wasn't so we just went straight to her house for the night. Woke up early the next day and went straight to the hospital. Mom had a tube coming out of her right side draining her bile into a bag.

She's had stage 4 breast cancer since 1996 and was in remission until about 2008 or at least that's when she realized it was back. So her cancer metastasized and has spread to her spine, liver and lungs as far as I know, one of the tumors in her liver is blocking her bile duct and not allowing her liver to fully function which is the reason for the bile drainage tube. She noticed a few weeks ago that she was getting quite jaundiced. Hospice came by her room to make a few arrangements for when she was to be going home she got a hospital bed, bedside commode and walker. My brother and I went back to the house to wait for the delivery and set things up.

Mom came home.

She tried the walker but it was too heavy for her to lift so we don't use it. Now her doctor at her hospital that she has been going to since she first got diagnosed is far from her original oncologist, he's actually the 4th oncologist she's had and she was only with him for about a month. He enrolled her in hospice and took her off her hormone therapy and told her chemotherapy would just not be an option for her at this point.

I had been searching the internet far and wide for any type of answer or treatment that has yet to be discussed that may be possible for her and I found this treatment called cyberknife, which is an outpatient highly accurate high dose of radiation type of "surgery" that can help with tumors. So we asked about it and got a referral to the closest cyberknife center, which also happens to be the University of Southern Alabama Mitchell Cancer Institute which also happens to be a cancer research center. So a few days into my trip we all load into the car and make our way over to the Mitchell cancer institute to have our consultation/second opinion.

The doctor asks how shes been doing, what her experiences have been like etc etc, he also explains that with stage 4 cancer sometimes you reach a point where treatment will hurt you more than help you. But for my mom he's not sure yet because her hospital only sent her old records and none of the new ones....*head bonk*
So we requested them to be sent over and he said we would get a call probably by the end of the week.

During this week of waiting...my Mom starts planning her funeral.....the urn, the slideshow of her life, the music, the dress, whether she wants the viewing and mass in one day or spread over two days.....that was actually really hard to deal with.

We didn't hear back from the doctor at the end of the week...instead we heard from him monday. He said the previous hormone therapy she was talking her body was responding too so she has a choice to either try the hormone therapy again or there's some chemo she hasn't tried yet and she can opt to do that instead, he also offered to let us go back to one of her previous oncologists that we all liked that had moved to a different office. YAY

Mom said she didn't want to do hormone therapy again so after some talking we decided we would give chemotherapy one last try, at least that way you go out knowing you tried everything you could instead of just giving up.

So now I'm waiting to make the appointment for her this monday when the oncologists office opens, hopefully for friday.

I came back with a ton of pictures and her wedding dress to my Dad.

The only thing that worries me is that she said if there's nothing they can do to help her that she wants the bile drain taken out....without a fully functioning liver...we can all only imagine her time will be short. Sometimes it seems shes become so completely set on dying because so many people have told her that shes going to die that she may go ahead without talking to or asking me and my brother and getting the tube taken out.

Either way I know this will all end one day but I don't think I'm ready...my brother is 28, I'm 23 and my mom is only 49. It just seems way to early. To top my cake off, my Dad just got diagnosed with prostate cancer and one of the treatments for prostate cancer is called watchful waiting because usually prostate cancer is very non aggressive very slow growing but dad is only 62 and he asked them about that...they said if he did that at the rate his is growing...they would give him 6 months to 1 year....how LAME.

When it rains it pours...

I thought I would just share a few pictures of my mom over the years. (she's the one on the right in all the pictures)










First two are pre-cancer the third was while her cancer was in remission and the last two are before she got jaundiced.

I just want to thank everyone for all your great thoughts and prayers. Thank you so much.