Cameron

Did you know they can make a wig that matches your exact hairstyle (you can also get a different hairstyle but I imagine maintaining any semblance of “normal” will be crucial to my mom’s mental health) AND it’s covered by insurance. 

This isn’t my story to tell but I’ll say that my mom’s been on Prozac for years and years. She stopped taking it when she retired, assuming that 99% of her stress was gone. When this cancer stuff all started happening I worried about her mental health. Support groups sound so lame because we all (maybe just me) envision a cluster of metal folding chairs and sad people in some church gym. But her oncologist recommended a support group that sounds really great and I hope she considers going. It’s all women and they bring in guest speakers occasionally, they’ll keep tabs on things like your “remission anniversary” (so they can send you a congratulations or “thinking of you” note) and also things like headscarf tips if that’s a thing that interests you. 

But my mom has cancer so here I am. We found out maybe a month or month and a half ago that she has stage 1 endometrial cancer. This is the first big thing that acknowledges my parents’ mortality, so it was upsetting, but stage 1 is good and apparently endometrial cancer is like *the* best (gynecological) cancer to have. So I didn’t let myself get too upset about it because they were going to do a complete hysterectomy and everything would be fine. 

I was able to be there for the surgery because I had a work trip to Louisville a few days after, so I just tacked on a few personal days to the front end of it and rented a car for the weekend. The surgery could’ve gone several different ways because of a number of factors but everything went great. They were able to do the entire procedure laparoscopically and she was home within 24 hours. Her oncologist said the tumor was only 1/3 of the way through the uterine wall, and he would be concerned if it was 1/2 or more. During the surgery they went ahead and removed the first two lymph nodes after the sentinel nodes, just to be safe. It’s my understanding that things filter through the body in a certain cycle, so if the cancer were to spread it would spread to that first node, then the second. 

We got the pathology results back a few days after the surgery and it turns out my mom is in the 5% group of <50% that metastasizes...which I guess means it spread to that first node. But the good thing was that it didn’t spread to that second node, so because they removed those two it would seem that all the cancer is out of her body. To be safe, we thought they might do some radiation, which obviously sucks but we were comforted by the fact that it wasn’t chemo.

Her appointment to decide their course of action was today. Her diagnosis is T1a N1 M0 FIGO IIIc1, which, after googling, pretty much means what I said above but is stage 3. Because she’s in that 5%, her doctor wants to be aggressive with the treatment. Chemo will be first and would start as early as next week. Initial treatment is once every 3 weeks for a total of 9 weeks. Then radiation starts for 5 weeks for a total of 25 sessions. Then, depending how all is tolerated, chemo would again follow, with one treatment every three weeks until complete.

(Side note: after promising my nurse friend I’d stay off google, I just googled “FIGO IIIc1″ to make sure it does mean stage 3, and the first result was “Analysis of failures in patients with FIGO stage IIIc1-IIIc2...” and I won’t let myself click on it because FUCK I can’t handle that shit right now.)