wonderful Wednesday

You may have noticed a theme in the titles of my last several posts. When I was a kid the church had a summer program called "Wonderful Wednesdays" (and later "Marvelous Mondays") where the kids and youth of the church could go to classes held by church members -- anything from drama to painting, trains to swimming -- It's always been a fun memory. At my last job we had an intake form where we would record what we did each day. At the top of the form I always wrote the day, the day of the week and its special alliterative adjective. It became a common thing for everyone to say 'but you can't be gripy, it's Marvelous Monday!'

And I wish I could say it's been an absolutely wonderful Wednesday, but that's simply not true. The good news is that The Hater's step-dad is now home, recovering from his knee surgery. He's doing well and sees his surgeon next week.

The bad news is that my Dad's Mother didn't get such good news. Apparently her cancer is very aggressive and they want to treat her with concurrent radiation and chemotherapy (after a port is surgically placed). That's the bad news. The worse news is that she's been a very passive person as long as I've known her, and I'm not so sure she knows how to make the decision if she wants to be treated or not.

The good news is that my family finally recognizes me as an expert in my field of knowledge (even if it's more than a year after the professionally community). They want me to call and talk to her after one of my aunt's, another RN, gets there to help explain things. Tomorrow I'm calling her radiologist to get the low-down before I call my grandmother. This is what I do; I'm very thankful that my family recognizes that I am able to help.

She has a CT scan tomorrow. The good news is that the type of cancer she has is generally very treatable, even in 87-year-old spring chickens. The CT will tell more about how involved the cancer is now. We're pretty sure it's moved into the lymph nodes, but the CT will tell exactly how involved they are. Even if there is massive lymph node involvement- it should not change the treatment plan. It's just a matter if she wants to try.

Which is true just about anything, I guess. I itch to go ahead and tap into the resources I know to have the kitchen sink on cancer care mailed to them, but I don't know yet if she even wants to seek aggressive treatment. So for the time I'm waiting to see if I need to send treatment information or only information on general cancer things. I'm not one to sit on my hands, so waiting isn't my forte.

It's a wonderful Wednesday. The Bradford Pears are blooming and I have antihistamines to enjoy them. The Hater and Zoloft love me, each in their own anthropomorphic way. Surgeries that were really risky years ago aren't as big of a deal. Cancer patients have more options now than they ever had. Today, indeed, is wonderful.