Prayers, please.

This Mother's Day was not very celebratory in my house.  It was tearful.  It was hard.  It was heavy.  Everything kind of feels heavy.

It's just stressful with everything that is going on and living in tight quarters at the moment to boot.  Bless Richard Wagler, my parents' contractor,'s heart, because they are working so hard to get us back into my parents' house.  It's coming together nicely and I expect there will be a lot of work about to explode in our personal life on top of all the other stuff.

We have more adults than beds, we have 7 adorable (wonderfully distracting) puppies (3 still need to find forever homes and the re-homing fee is to recoup the amount spent on their healthcare costs), we have a protective order against a person that was once an integral part of our family, we have cancer in our midst, and we are about to move sometime in the next 2 or so weeks.

To say my family is stressed would be quite an understatement. When it rains it pours and in our life right now it is pouring.

Mom had an appointment with the surgeon yesterday and the expectation in my own head was that it was going to be straight forward:  schedule the surgery and get on with it.  It wasn't what I expected.  On Friday mom is having an MRI with contrast dye in order to make sure that the tumor is not in the muscle tissue nearby, because if it is infiltrating the muscle tissue mom will have to have chemo and possibly radiation.

Next week, she's got an appointment with her endocrinologist to decide if radiation would really be a problem for her thyroid or if it should possibly come out.  She's going to start the 5 year medicine pretty soon, because of the delay in scheduling the surgery for additional testing and appointments (and so we can move).  The surgeon wants mom to know the full extent of every option, survival rates of the options, and be really ready to make the best possible decision.

Facing chemo as a possibility again has gotten me feeling a bit discouraged, because I was really relieved when the oncologist had ruled that out as a possibility (though not entirely).  The plan has always been to remove lymph nodes during the mastectomy and test them for malignancies and then determine after the surgery if further treatment would be required.

I've decided to not be relieved again until the surgery is over and we know for sure if she's facing chemo.  Chemo will be a whole other experience that is not going to be pleasant, but whatever is necessary to keep her around for many years to come.

If anyone who happens upon this blog post could spare a few moments to raise my mother and our family up in prayer, I would be ever so grateful.