Saturdays with Janice

I spent the day with my mom and I guess her back is feeling a little better. She had her first radiation treatment yesterday. She has eight more to go. They are trying to shrink the tumors on her back so she can have some relief from the pain and discomfort.

You know, I used to think that someone with stage four cancer was bed-ridden, barely conscious and horribly gaunt. My mother has a healthy appetite, drinks a martini a day and gets around just fine. We had breakfast, went shopping and had lunch. I am trying to have a standing date with her on Saturdays. Stage four is basically when a cancer spreads to a different location from the primary site. It's like an escaped convict. A rogue. A loner. A rebel. It is possible to beat a stage four cancer if it's a treatable type. We now know that it isn't multiple myloma. It might be colon cancer, in which case they could operate to remove it, then give her a radiation and chemo combination to get rid of the cancer in the secondary locations. I don't want to get my hopes up about it, but I've decided that it's okay to be optimistic. I am not going to treat my mother like a dead person. I wouldn't want to be treated that way. Instead, we are already talking about how she can parlay this into a new career, if she survives it. She can become a patient advocate, specializing in persons with cancer. She is a very determined person.