This article is part of the series “One Moment At A Time” about my family’s journey as we help my mother fight brain cancer. Feel free to subscribe below to receive periodic updates about our journey in your email inbox. Thank you for your continued support during this challenging life moment.
This article is a continuation from the previous post “Just For Shits And Giggles”
MEASURING GOOD NEWS
My mother walked back into her home for the first time after being rushed to the Emergency Room three days earlier. A sense of relief radiated from her face as she stepped through the kitchen and gingerly walked into the living room. I helped her sit down into her normal spot on the comfortable blue sofa where she and Mike usually sat to relax in the evening.
As I helped take off my mother’s black slip-on shoes, I couldn’t help but think back to the previous week when everything in life seemed ok. Everyone was healthy. We had just spent a nice Thanksgiving holiday with our extended family at my mother’s home. I had just arrived back from traveling and planned to stay a while. The only slight worry we had was my mother repeating herself.
But after the past several days, we had begun a new normal. Good news became relative. A couple days ago, we had learned that she had no other masses in her chest or in her abdomen. Good news. And an hour after her colonoscopy earlier in the day, we had learned her colon looked fine. Good news. This “good news” meant that the tumor was only isolated in her brain. The rest of her body appeared healthy.
Any piece of good news after what we had learned only three days prior was a relief. Our souls were searching for good news with each passing second to relieve the sudden pressure on our newly aching hearts.
NEEDING ANSWERS
The exhaustion from the past twenty-four hours of my mother’s cleansing had wiped her out. Mike, his son Matt, Abby and I sat in the living room watching my mother rest her eyes with her feet propped up on the leg rest and her body wrapped in a soft, microfiber blanket. We took a collective exhale from the emotionally draining experience that we had just endured. And we couldn’t help our minds from drifting into thinking about what the tumor was. And thinking about what the future would hold.
I sat next to my mother as she slept and lightly caressed the back of her head. As I watched my hand gently move from side to side over her dark, wavy hair, I knew my hand was only inches away from whatever it was that had invaded my mother’s head. Why can’t I just reach inside of there and pull out all of the bad stuff? It was so close yet so far away from being that simple.
I wanted answers. I needed to know as quickly as I could what the tumor was and how we could best help my mother. My mother’s biopsy was scheduled in five days. And as I thought through the process, I realized it would take another five days to learn the results. Which meant that we wouldn’t know what was going on with my mother until ten days from now. Which meant ten more days for this thing inside of her head to keep growing and potentially keep damaging her healthy brain cells as we had already begun to rapidly witness over the past week.
ALL ON AN APP
Even though my heart ached, my head pounded and my body was physically weakened due to lack of sleep and stress, my mind somehow continued to work on overdrive. I quickly remembered the nurse during our hospital discharge mentioning to me that I could download an app on my phone and access my mother’s hospital chart. It was a way for patient’s to see test results, confirm upcoming appointments and store important information like allergies and current medication information.
As my eyes anxiously stared at the small circle indicating the status of the app downloading, I began to see the circle was not moving. My throbbing headache continued to pound even harder. I dropped my hand clutching my phone down to my lap and released a giant exhale remembering how painfully slow the internet speeds were at my mother’s house. My eyes slowly lowered closed and I laid my head back on the soft couch cushion next to my mother giving my mind some much needed respite.
MISSING MRI RESULTS
After arriving back from the Meijer store in Angola with my mother’s initial prescriptions later that evening, I noticed the app had downloaded and I quickly gathered all of the information that I needed to set up her account on my phone. Finally, I could get at the information to begin reading up on everything that had so happened so quickly over the past several days. But the one document that had never been shown to me, and something I forgot about after hospital shift leader discussed with me, was the results of her MRI.
My chest tightened and my skin was overcome by a strange tingling sensation. Why hadn’t anyone ever shown me the MRI results? I had completely forgotten about them. And no one reminded us or offered to walk us through the results. It had been three full days since the MRI so the results had to be completed by now.
I sat in the basement on a comfortable couch that came from Mike’s old home before he moved in with my mother. Mike and my mother were soundly sleeping in their beds directly above me. A light from the stairway across the room filtered into the darkness surrounding me. The light from my phone illuminated my face as I stared down at my phone.
Alert notifications began popping up quickly on the screen as the app opened, one right after the other. A small red circle hovered over the ‘test results’ icon indicating my mother had 23 test results to review. I tapped my finger on the icon and the long list of the various tests that had been run over the past several days appeared:
Lactic Acid.
Urinalysis.
Blood Culture.
Basic Metabolic Panel.
I anxiously thumbed through the long, stacked list of tests. My eyebrows lowered into a perplexed look. I thumbed back through the list for a second time but couldn’t find the MRI test result. After flipping one more time through the results, I realized I wasn’t going to magically make it appear. My eyes grew tired while trying to focus my vision on the bright screen in the dark. I gently laid my phone down on the coffee table in front of the couch, pulled a soft blanket over my body and shut my eyes to escape this real time nightmare.
FINALLY, THE NEWS I DIDN’T WANT TO READ
The next afternoon, I sat next to my mother on the living room couch staring out the window and out over the beautiful lake while she took a long snooze. The frigid water of the lake softly reflected the gorgeous sunlight endlessly falling from the sky.
Ding.
I pulled out my phone from my black sweatpants pocket and turned it over. I have always had all sound notifications turned off on my phone so it was odd that something had alerted me. I looked at the screen and saw that I had one new test result from my mother’s hospital chart.
My heart beat sped up. My fingers clicked on the notification and the face recognition software validated my access. “You have one new test result” the message read that appeared on my phone screen. As I clicked on the message, the text of the new test result appeared: MRI Brain With/Without Contrast.
There it was. The test result that I had been wanting to know so badly. But was I really receiving this super important test result through an app on my phone? Shouldn’t I be sitting with a doctor to go through the language so I could ask any questions or have the doctor clarify the big, confusing terminology?
There I was sitting next to my mother resting peacefully on a sunny December afternoon. No one else was home but her and I. And I was about to read the language about what they found in the MRI of my mother’s brain in our living room.
I reached over and grabbed her hand. Her eyes briefly opened and she smiled at me knowing that I was sitting next to her. As her eyes softly closed, I looked back at my phone and took a deep breath to prepare myself to read one of the most emotionally difficult texts that I have ever read.
… To Be Continued. CLICK HERE to continue.
One moment at a time.
I plan to continue to write about this new life journey. It is a tough topic to write about but I feel writing will be a great emotional release for me and could help others along the way going through something similar. If you would like to receive a weekly update, feel free to enter your email and sign up below.
