A Diagnosis

[hrj]

My mom has her diagnosis from the biopsy -- a lot faster this time than last year. This time it's your common garden-variety myeloma rather than something exotic that they have to send off to the specialists to examine. Of course, I've immediately gone off and googled lots of myeloma sites to stuff my brain full of entirely too much information on the topic. Of course there'll be more testing before a solid prognosis and treatment plan is available -- I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the fact that it doesn't seem to have been apparent in all the scans she had last year for the spinal thing means it's been identified at a fairly early stage. She says not to worry about her. Hah!

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Yeah, right. Not worry about your mother? Never happen. I hope it's minor.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I think "minor" is off the table from the get-go -- the first thing all the myeloma sites say is that there is no "cure". But there do seem to be a lot of options for control of symptoms and even for suppression of the tumors. And it seems to be a field where there's a lot of new and interesting stuff being developed -- not just pie-in-the-sky stuff, but "initial clinical trials show exciting results" stuff.

[xrian.livejournal.com]

Bummer. Yeah, a lot of cancer thingys are now more or less controllable, so we wind up living with them for years (like diabetes) rather than dying the first time they hit us -- which would be much more tidy, but a lot less fun. This IS an improvement.

As for not worrying -- well, it's hard not to, even if it's stuff you have no control over. About all you can do is to try to keep directing the energy toward things you can do something about. Letting go is never easy.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Ah. I was reading that as "melanoma". Yes, this sucks, but I'm glad that there are options for controlling it. Bad things aren't supposed to happen to mothers. I know there's got to be a law about that somewhere.