The past couple of months Mom had been suffering a lot of pain. After a lot of waiting and going from doctor to doctor and diagnosis to diagnosis, she was ultimately told that she had a non-cancerous cyst on her small intestine. She needed to have it removed, and then things would get back to normal.
On February 7, Mom went into surgery to have the non-cancerous cyst removed from her small intestine. Before the surgery was over, though, the surgeon met with us in a conference room to break the news: What they thought was a non-cancerous cyst turned out to be Stage IV Duodenal Cancer - an inoperable tumor in her small intestine, with the cancer spreading to a couple spots on her liver. The surgeon did what she could to deaden the nerves around the tumor to ease the pain Mom had been feeling the past couple of months, and then closed things up. While the surgeon didn't have all the answers we were looking for, she gave us a plan: Get Mom healed from surgery, and then tackle the cancer with chemotherapy.
We are presently working on the "get Mom healed" part of the plan. She was released from the hospital after 1 1/2 weeks, but after a few days at home, she had a surgery-related infection, and so has been back in the hospital for the past few days to get the infection under control.
We are still waiting to receive results from the pathology tests to know exactly what Mom has on her plate. In the meantime, we are doing all that we can to let Mom know how much we love and appreciate her. She has done everything for everyone her whole life. Now it's her turn to let us help her!
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