LA’s Soapbox

Background: In 1996 my Mom had a cancerous lump removed from her breast. She went through radiation therapy and took cancer medicine for over five years at which point it was delcared that she was cancer free. That was a great day!

Mom suffers from Parkinsons, she is diabetic, has high blood pressure, a touch of high cholesterol, is asmatic and has shrunk close to 3 inches due to Osteoporosis. I don’t have to delve into how much pain she endures every day She also had macular pucker in both eyes…. yes, both! On January 26th of this year she had her right eye operated on, it has been a slow recovery and she still has to have the left eye operated on. For the past three or four months she has been suffering from a burning and pulling sensation in the area under her arm on the side of the breast where she previously had a cancerous lump and because it was painful she would of course rub the area, and in so doing discovered two lumps.

I took her for her regular three month visit with our family doctor in early April. He was very concerned by the lumps. He immediately called the specialist who had preformed Mom’s original lumpectomy … Mom goes to see him faithfully every year for an examination and a mammogram ….within days she had been to the specialist and had a battery of tests and examinations of all sorts, (including a mammogram) at the local clinic and hospitals. She even had tests on a Saturday morning (highly unusual) as the doctors have deemed her condition to be urgent. The lumps must be removed as soon as possible because they say that the odds are very high that they are cancerous.

The specialist ie: the doctor who will be performing the surgery, called me Monday morning to tell me that Mom will be operated on on May 26th and that he would take care of everything regarding the setting up of all the pre-operative tests that need to be done. Lo and behold the hospital called yesterday and all the tests have been set up.. Monday of next week and Tuesday of the following week. Our family doctor also insisted on seeing her again asap and personally set up a special appointment which was today. In the meantime, Mom was scheduled to see her Opthalmologist on May 29th for a follow up on her eye and to find out when he will operate on the other eye. The earliest she will be getting out of the hospital is May 28th, so there’s no way she’ll be able to keep that appointment. So I called and rescheduled…the guy on the phone was so nice and pushed the appointment up to May 24th

The doctors and staff have been wonderful… people shouldn’t crap on the Canadian Medicare system… it does work well most of the time… like everything in life it has it’s flaws.

The next two to three weeks will be hectic to say the least… I hate cancer, not to mention all the other diseases she has…. My Mom is the greatest person you could ever meet… send good vibes… especially on May 26th …..

This entry was posted on Friday, May 12th, 2006 at 1:36 and is filed under General, Family Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.