So There We Were...

At the beginning of August, my family all came over for dinner to celebrate my sister's birthday. This is a pretty standard thing as anyone who's read here for long will know as I like to cook and we all like to eat, so generally it works out nicely. After the kiddo was in bed and the boys had descended into the basement to play their traditional several rounds of something involving death and destruction on the computers in the basement and the dishes were done and the girls were hanging out in the living room, mom kept moving from place to place unable to get comfortable. Her back had been nagging at her for a while and it had now gotten to the place that she really couldn't find a comfortable way to sit or lay.

Mom's back has a long history of being out of whack. It's inevitably because she does too much on her own without asking for help, not remembering (or choosing not to remember) that she's no longer a spring chicken, able to leap capital E in a single bound. And so we asked what she'd been up to and she was unable to come up with anything out of the ordinary. So my sister and I encouraged her to go to her chiropractor. Because generally this is a very helpful thing for her and makes all right with the world within a matter of days.

She went to the chiropractor the next day, but it didn't help. It didn't necessarily make things worse, but the pain was getting worse. The chiropractor recommended a back specialist...and so mom and dad spent some time on the phone with various doctors and finally found a back specialist to take a look. They did some x-rays thinking maybe there was a herniated disc but found nothing and decided it was just arthritis in her spine and Aleve twice a day was recommended. But this didn't make a dent in the pain. And it got so bad that mom went to the ER. Because of the location of the back pain, they did a CT scan and ultrasound looking for kidney stones and ran all manner of other tests. Ultimately they found a bladder infection and said she ought to get her ovaries looked at as they seemed enlarged. And so after a weekend of rest, off to her regular doctor she went with copies of the scans as a bit of a "check the block" - because now that the infection was getting treated the pain was beginning to abate. But the regular doctor looked at the ultrasound and sent her home with an appointment with an oncologist for the next day.

My mom has stage 3 ovarian cancer. She'll have surgery on the 9th. Chemo is up in the air, but I'm thinking it's likely.

A lot of people will say that the problem with ERs is that they run every diagnostic test known to man for every person who walks through their doors. I'm not sure I see this as a problem anymore. In a family with a history of kidney stones and a mother with a history of simple over exertion but no history of ovarian cancer, this was not a diagnosis any of us were expecting and something that has left all of us kind of at a loss.

Prayers appreciated.