Home...safe and sound.

Again.

Mom has come home tonight, and is comfortably resting where she wants to be. I am happy she is doing so well. She has drain tubes that she will wear for about another week..maybe a few days longer than a week. We will drain them daily and keep track of how much we are taking out. It is a little yucky, but necessary. Fluid likes to collect in any space in the body where there used to be tissue, so until then, the drains remain.

Mom only needed to use her morphine drip about 3 times total, and didn't even ask for pain meds the entire afternoon. She is such a trooper. I said I want her strength to her, and she reminded me that when I was in the hospital with Kate, I did do what I needed to do to be able to heal and be with her. It is amazing what our minds convince us we can do if we really push ourselves.

Mom has to be put back on coumadin..nasty nasty drug in my opinion. It is a med her surgeon clearly doesn't want her on it, but her oncologist is making her take for that pulmonary embolism that was found back in June. She has a few more months to be on it, and they had to bridge her off of it for surgery so she wouldn't bleed out during the actual surgery, but now she has to go back on it. Blech.

Other than that..she has tried to sneak a peak at times today to see what she looks like down there. She said that she will have her mental breakdown later, in private. I don't blame her. I would feel the same way not seeing my breast there anymore. It is such a harsh, harsh reality.

Her surgeon said this today when I asked if mom is cancer free at the moment. "It is true we removed all of her visible cancer. However, your mom is at a very high risk of the cancer returning, rapidly. Therefore just as a tree is chopped down, the roots remain. We must get in there, and kill and remove the roots (radiation) to ensure we get rid of the entire tree."

One month from now, she does 33 sessions of radiation. After that 33rd session, we celebrate. When we get the results that her blood looks good, and her CT scan shows no more signs, we will have the biggest party ever.