worry

found out yesterday that my mother may have lung cancer, a common occurrence in Asian women who are exposed to second hand smoke.  our best guess is that her father was the source of her exposure, since she never went to bars and nobody in our family smokes.  looking back, there were two other women on her side of the family that died of lung cancer, which is troubling.

i'm not sure what i want to do just yet. we all knew she was ailing, she's had the same dry cough for over a decade and it was only now that her doctor found something.  and since it seems to be moving slowly, her doctors are exhausting every other possibility before proceeding with treating it like it's cancer. Pneumonia, Valley Fever, fungal infection, they are looking into everything else even though they all agree that every case of lung cancer they've ever seen shows up looking like her CAT scan.

i am worried.  doctors have made mistakes with her before.  one year, her doctor found a pulsating mass in her abdomen, recommended they open her up and remove it.  it turned out to be her abdominal aorta.  what?  a first year med student knows what that feels like when you palpate a patient's belly.  heck, even i know what that feels like.  she could have sued that guy for malpractice, but she didn't.

ugh, my thoughts are all over the map.  can't put them all into a cohesive entry.  if i need to, i can move home for a while, or at least take some time off and hang out with her during her recovery.  in the mean time, i'm sending all positive thoughts and prayers her way.  screw the rest of the world, my mom needs as much positivity, prayers and love as she can get right now.