Lengthy first post about my mom

Hi everyone,

I'm new here and and have never posted before. As a warning, this might be a pretty long post. My feelings are not very together.

My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in the middle of July of last year, and from the outset, everyone in my family felt that it would be a small, manageable thing, and that she would be treated for it and continue her life as normal, and she felt very optimistic, and didn't seem changed. About a month later, her doctors discovered that the cancer had metastatized to a small area on her spine and her liver. From her reports, these areas were very manageable as they were both a couple of mm's in size. Her attitude didn't change at all from before, and she insisted that she would be fine, and that she'd recover from it completely. Immediately after that information, I went online and researched metastatic breast cancer and it seemed so, so much more scary and serious than her or the rest of my family was letting on. The statistics I found said there was a 20% survival rate for Stage IV breast cancer, but that fact seemed so incredibly far from the vibes I was getting from my mother and my family. Never did anyone talk about or approach the subject in a way that would suggest that she might die from it, and the phrase that I heard from every person in my family was, "I just know that she's going to be okay". I don't think she ever talked with her doctor about prognosis, or how much time she had so to speak, and she generally seemed pretty relaxed and easy going about things, and assumed that the facts and figures of her prognosis weren't a big issue. I understand that things are probably different for people underneath the surface, and people won't always reveal their true attitude, but at the same time, she's pretty open with her emotions, and I'm good at reading her, and she just didn't seem that frightened that something was really wrong. It was a little bit frustrating to try to talk to my family after I had been reading this info on it, and to find that they were pretty aloof about these things I had found out.

And I don't know if maybe that attitude helped her, because she went through a cycle of chemotherapy and it didn't seem like chemotherapy as I had heard stories of it. She spent several days in bed, and was pretty tired for those months, but generally she was bright and fairly energetic. Sometimes she'd go out for coffee or meet friends the same days she'd have a dosage of chemotherapy (she had them every Monday for I think 3 months). During that time I came home to live with her, and we spent a lot of happy time together doing things and going places, and it was hard to imagine her as sick, both because she seemed so well, and because everyone was gung ho on insisting she was fine.

Right before Christmas they ran a bunch of tests - MRI, tumor marker, etc - and got very, very good results. The cancer in her breast and her lymph nodes was gone completely, and the places on her bone and liver had shrunk to 1 - 2 mms. The doctor was prepared to say that the place on her liver could possibly be scar tissue. The meds she was on were, Tamoxifen, a bone drip she has once a month, and then the chemo. Afterwards, she continued to get good news, her tumor markers were very low, and about two, her MRIs were really good, and about two and a half weeks ago her doctor told her she could consider herself in remission. And that made her really happy. She has been doing a lot of things she has been wanting to do for a long time, taking a class to become a realtor, making a garden, remodeling her kitchen, and she just got engaged her boyfriend. And generally she's been really happy with her life. A little while after Christmas when things seemed stable and well, I went back to Boston to live with my boyfriend.

Well, last Wednesday was a really really scary night, and I think for the first time since any of this, I began to feel the realness of everything, and I started really flipping out. She was out driving in the evening, and got very dizzy all of a sudden and felt that she was going to faint. She pulled off in a gas station, which was all closed up for the night, but a security officer came over to see what was up and she told him to call 911. At the hospital she started having some really strange symptoms, she was having trouble constructing sentences and couldn't say what she wanted, and she was having trouble moving the right side of her body (!!!!!!!!!!!!) My grandmother said it seemed like she had just had a stroke, which really upset me. Her brain scans found that she had brain mets (1.7 cm, 1 cm, and some other smaller spots in her frontal lobe) and that was what was causing the symptoms. At that point I kind of went bananas. I had some notion that this was going to be about my mom when I got a phone call at 10something pm in the middle of some television show, but that news suddenly caused some reality to set in and at that point I very much wanted to throw the phone and say WHAT THE FUCK????? or something similarly inappropriate... For some reason, this seems to be the point where it suddenly feels that she's in real danger, and I can't handle that. I really really really really don't know what I'll do if she dies, she is this constant in my life, and the one I go to when I really need to figure something out, and the one that I know will be there and I can go to. I feel like if she goes, then I will be alone in the world, in the sense of the people who are there through everything, and make it so that you don't have to worry if the very worst happens. For me, I think the women line of the family is my source of strength, and one of the most important parts of my life.

I guess emergencies have that capability of shocking you into reality.. But the scariness of the situation, combined with the fact that this is the fourth place that it's gone to, makes it feel awfully much like I might not have that much time with her. For some reason, right now the people I have the greatest instinct to take care of are the rest of my family, like my grandparents and my mom's boyfriend, because for some reason it is most palpable to imagine what it must be like for them watching everything. For some reason it is like I have a block to trying to feel what my mother feels like now, because I don't know how to imagine the feeling of thinking about how it is to die.

People are still hopeful, and I think it is so lucky that the other areas are under control now. She will have general radiation for 12 days, and then they are going to do pinpointed radiation. She is continuing to have some nerve problems in her right side : ((

I am 23 and my mom is 48 by the way. She will turn 49 on Sept 9 and I'll get to be with her for her birthday : )) And for the susan komen walk

Anyway, any advice is very welcome or things you think I should do, etc. Also website recommendations would be very welcome. Thanks for reading my very long post.