My mother has been in the hospital since Monday and I haven’t gotten a whole lot of news. A few minutes ago I started feeling really paranoid and snuck off to call my father.

All is still well. She had her Methotrexate dose on Monday and she is still side effect free. She was just being hooked up to her Rituximab IV when I called. That’s the drug she gets on an outpatient basis on Wednesdays. Again, still side effect free.

Oh Happy Day!

The only issue she’s having is that she is a little anemic. I don’t recall seeing that mentioned in any of the articles I’ve read recently, and she has been a little low on the blood counts in the past so it may not be related. Still worth checking into though.

All in all, still going great. Fingers crossed that it continues.

I finally got the name of the third chemotherapy drug my mother is taking. I had been told a couple of times, but it is a mouthful and I needed to actually see it written down before I could wrap my brain around it.

So, along with the Methotrexate and the Rituximab, we now have Temozolomide. I like the sound of this one. It messes with the tumor’s DNA and kills the cells dead. No messing around with other chemicals that the tumor needs, this goes right to the source and kicks its ass. Thank you.

Based on the wiki article there aren’t a lot of side effects, mostly just vomiting. That might explain why my mother has also been put on an anti-nausea medication on top of everything else.

I saw my mother briefly yesterday. She looked tired, but she had just finished cooking boiled dinner for 14 people. That would wear anyone out. She still hasn’t had any side effects to any of the treatment. Fingers crossed.

Today she is being checked back into Mass General for her second Methotrexate treatment. She’ll be in the hospital for four days. They give her the drug and then monitor her while they wait for it to pass through her system. It’s a nasty bugger.

We continue to be hopeful that the chemotherapy treatments knock this tumor down to nothing, and we continue to keep our fingers crossed.

Mom had a hospital visit scheduled for 8:30 this morning at Mass General. Given how much my father loves driving in Boston traffic I’m guessing they left the house at 6:00. I kinda don’t blame them.

She is having a chemo treatment today. I don’t know which drug. I think it’s Rituximab, but I’m not sure. It’s just an outpatient thing. They’ll plug into her IV port, give her the dose, probably hang out for a while to make sure everything goes well, probably have some of the numerous doctors working on her case come by for a check up, then she’ll get to go home.

Monday is her next inpatient visit. That will be a four day stay. Let’s get through this one before we worry about that one. Not that I’m worried about this one, just that I’m worried about everything. When I hear some news about how it went today I’ll share it. Until then…

Fingers crossed.

Here’s a quick update on my mother.  As stated yesterday, I was on the phone with my father discussing how now that Jen is feeling better we are more or less the only members of the family besides him who are not either sick or out of town when I overhead my mother in the background asking Dad to ask me if there was a Legal Seafoods near us. 

Back story:  The last time we saw my mother in the hospital she let it be known that she really, really wanted a baked stuffed lobster.  Like… really wanted one.  So we talked about trying to get her one.  My sister sort of took the lead but due to other circumstances nothing happened.

So Jen and I ran with it.  We called Legals and ordered a baked stuffed lobster for take out.  We picked it up at 4:00 and took it to my parents house.  My mother was thrilled.  She devoured the whole 2.5 pounds of shelled goodness.  She thanked us a bunch of times, but we were really happy to help out.

As for her health, she was really good.  No really noticeable confusion.  Her memory was fine.  There were no side effects from the chemo.  She was fine.  Her only complaint was that she hasn’t been able to wash her hair because of the stitches closing up the biopsy incision.

We went over again today and she seemed tired, but otherwise fine.  She and Dad had gone food shopping and I think that wore her out a little.  Again, no side effects, no memory problems.  We were very pleased with how she is holding up.

She goes back to the hospital on Wednesday for a treatment.  It’s just an outpatient thing.  They’ll give her the meds and send her on her way.  Then a week from tomorrow she will go back for another dose of Methatrexate.  She’ll be admitted for four days for that one.

Fingers crossed that she continues to respond well to the chemo, and that the side effects continue to stay the hell away.

I have nothing new to report on the Mom front. All I know is that she got home yesterday. She will have to go back again in a week or so for her second Methatrexate treatment. That will probably be three or four days (I think) in the hospital. That drug is heavy duty shit and it has to be flushed out of her system before they will let her out of their site. (I can’t use the word “flush” in that sense without mentally being transported back to college when I programmed in C and had to use the fflush() function. Flush that buffer. Sorry, interlude over.)

So tonight is supposed to be a fun night. The kids’ school is having a movie night. They are showing Megamind (which I haven’t seen yet) in the cafeteria… or something. I’m not up on the details. We bought four tickets (two from each kid. We share the wealth that way, ya know?) and we were all looking forward to going…

And now my step daughter has strep throat again, and Jen’s flu bug made a roaring come back last night. It may just be me and the little man. I hope everyone is well enough to go.

I just received word from my brother that my mother is on her way home from the hospital at this very moment.

Fingers very much crossed.

Assuming the numbers come out all right today, my mother will be coming home for a while. They have a value that represents the amount of methatrexate in her system. When that number hits 0.20 she can go home. It was 0.33 yesterday after being 2.something on Monday.

She will need to go back to the hospital in about a week and a half for her second dose of methatrexate. That being the nastier drug, needs to be monitored by the hospital. Her other chemo drugs can be done on an outpatient basis.

I think this is a good thing, but it also concerns me.

On Monday evening she was still pretty confused. There are a lot of things that she remembers clearly that never happened. What if she continues to be this confused while she’s home alone with Dad? What if Dad falls asleep one night and Mom decides she’s going to go visit her sister who lives next door… when neither of her sisters have ever lived next door. What if she walks outside and then can’t figure out where she is? What do we do then?

We all feel the same way about this. My father included. So when the topic of discharge came up he spoke to the doctors about it. He was told that in most cases the patients confusion decreases when they are at home in their normal environment. They expect that to happen in my mother’s case. The doctor was convincing enough to alleviate most of my father’s anxiety on the issue. I wish I had been there to hear it too, because hearing it second hand is helping, but not that much. I am really worried about the next few days.

Fingers crossed.

So two weekends ago we were unable to visit my mother in the hospital because Jen caught the flu. Last weekend it looked like I was coming down with it too and that pretty much screwed us again. This weekend, as we just found out minutes ago, my step daughter has strep throat again. We can’t catch a break.

We went to visit my mother at the hospital last night. She’s taken two of the three chemotherapy drugs and so far no side effects. Fingers crossed that continues.

She had a couple of instances of confusion and memory problems. She insisted that she was visited by people she wasn’t visited by. She insisted that one of the hospital rooms she’d been in during this stay used to be her mother’s apartment. She had a hard time listing off the grandkids by age.

The hospital staff has given her a couple of criteria that her body has to meet in order for her to be released. They told her that it might be possible for her to go home during the day, but come back at night. That seems a little odd, but she is showing signs of a condition known as sundowning, which is where patients with memory issues often see their symptoms get worse at night. All of the things we saw were after the sun went down, and probably weren’t there at all earlier in the day.

We’ll see what happens.

Fingers crossed.

My mother started chemo yesterday. The update I got today from my sister was that everything is fine so far. No side effects. She’s very tired, but otherwise nothing.

My relief is immense.

So far, so good.

I don’t know if everyone does this, but I try to distract my self from worrying about stuff I can’t control. If I think about something else for a while it takes my mind off the fact that I can’t do anything to help my mother with her illness.

I haven’t finished my RPM project. I still have two rhythm and three lead guitar parts to record and then I have to mix the whole thing. I have another second shift day coming at the end of the month. I should have the 2011 project done by then, so I will try and use the time to finish up the last few songs from the 2010 project. After that I think it will be time to more or less retire my ADAT recorder and move on to Garage Band on my swanky new MacBook. I think I might invent a project to learn how to use Garage Band (or to fudge it so it can handle my work flow) by taking a few songs from each of the three finished RPM things (assuming ’10 and ’11 get finished… they will) and rerecording them. The kids have also expressed an interest in trying to record some music with me. That will be fun to do, but I want to know what I’m doing with the software first.

The Bruins have won seven games in a row and have moved into second place in the Eastern Conference. Last night they beat, and beat up, the team they are fighting for second place with, Tampa Bay. Lots of bad blood brewing between the two teams. It looks like the trades and the longest road trip of the year and Tuukka Rask suddenly not sucking all happened at exactly the right time.

The real news, however, is that my mother’s PET scan did not find any other tumors. That makes me very happy. The bad-news-that-wasn’t-as-bad-as-it-could-have-been, finding out that the tumor is lymphoma, plus the good news that the steroids have reduced the size of the tumor, plus the good news that the PET scan, made yesterday a pretty good day as far as news about my mother is concerned.

Today she’s having a port put into her stomach. That can’t be good, but if it makes getting through the chemotherapy easier then let’s do it.

Fingers crossed

(maybe I’m not doing so well with the distractions after all)