The "C" Word

A few weeks back I wrote a post called Cheers To The Fighters.  It was amazing to be in the presence of someone like Elaine who, in spite of battling ovarian cancer for a few years now, has managed to remember the most important thing:  That every single day is worth putting up one hell of a fight for.

And now, a few weeks later, I somehow find my mom in that same category.  It has never been a secret that my mom is one tough lady.  I have spent my entire life marveling at the way she manages to embrace every single day and I'm constantly trying to model my own world view to reflect that same sense of fun and fascination.  The eternal optimist, I'm not sure she has ever faced a challenge or an obstacle without genuinely believing that everything would turn out just fine.  But on Friday night when she sat me down and told me she had cancer, I honestly think I forgot how to breathe.

Most of us spend our lives silently reminding ourselves that just because you've got a sharp pain in your back or a swollen lymph node doesn't mean something is wrong.  Over time, you manage to convince yourself that things are never as bad as you imagine them to be and you start to relax.  Bad things happen all the time.  But you start to get comfortable with the fact that it's not actually going to happen to you and you breathe a little easier because you're one of the lucky ones.  But then you get the news that your mom has a cancerous tumor in her lower colon and all of a sudden you remember why you used to get so nervous when something didn't feel right.  Because the truth of the matter is, every now and then, it CAN actually happen to you... or someone you love.

Luckily, after running additional tests, they haven't found any more tumors, so we are hopeful that this has been caught very early and is relatively contained.  She will have to undergo surgery sometime in the next week to have this tumor, part of her colon, part of her small intestine, her appendix and some lymph nodes removed.  Once they take them out and can analyze everything in a lab, they will be able to better determine if she is going to need some sort of radiation and/or chemotherapy treatments as well.  We are already considering ourselves very lucky because most of the time, there are no symptoms in the early stages of this type of cancer.  By some miracle, my mom DID experience symptoms, so that is a very good thing going into this.


I spent the weekend self-medicating with copious amounts of wine and distracting myself with my college friends up at the lake and finishing it off with the Tim McGraw concert on Sunday night.  Most of the time I was caught up enough to remember to have a good time, but every now and then when I got a few seconds to think to myself, my mind instantly wandered back to my mom.  How can this happen?  I'm still not sure it has actually sunken in that this is real and it's not happening to somebody else.  It's not an easy thing to wrap your head around, you know?  I still can't believe that THIS is what I'm writing about right now.  The person you see as invincible suddenly is a lot more human than you ever considered before.  And I feel like a complete ass most of the time because my friends keep asking how I'm doing.  Well, I'm not doing that great.  This freaking sucks.  But at the same time, it feels selfish somehow to be upset because this isn't even happening to me.  Not directly at least.  We're supposed to be strong and tough and most of the time, I swear I am.  From what I can tell, my mom is a lot more clear with all of this than the rest of us.  But for me, it hasn't fully sunken in yet - I mean, I've probably contemplated deleting this post at least ten times already because I feel like I'm going to post it and then I'm going to remember that it's not actually true and I'm going to have made a big deal writing about nothing.     But that fact is:  My mom has cancer.  The freaking "C" word that until Friday evening, never had a place anywhere near her.

Everyone keeps telling me to stay positive and to think only about the most positive things as possible.  But in the back of my mind I want to scream.  I WAS staying positive.  It was SUPPOSED to just be a benign mass in her colon like some random fibroid or something else medical and completely harmless.  I was perfectly content being positive.  And then you find out that the one thing you spent so much energy willing to not be true actually IS.  It's like a really unfunny joke or something.  I have no doubt in my mind that my mom will get rid of this.  As far as we can tell, they caught it very early, which is a miracle when you think about the fact that when it comes to gastrointestinal carcinoid tumors, there are rarely any signs in the early stages.

But there are so many unavoidable things that pop into my mind in spite of that.  One of the shitty things about this type of cancer is that it's common for more tumors to grow elsewhere in the gastrointestinal system either at the same time, or later on.  I think that aside from the surgery she has to have to remove a bunch of stuff, the "later on" part is the thing that really freaks me out.  Everyone keeps telling me to stay as positive as possible, and trust me, I'm trying... But some of the time, I'm honestly completely terrified.  If anyone was born a fighter, it was my mom.  I have complete faith she's going to kick this thing, but every now and then, I can't help but think about the rest.