My mom beat cancer

[I’m writing this post much later so I can tell the whole story, but dating it July 2024, which is when the events occurred.]

I spent several weeks at my mom and dad’s house this summer (joined by Doc and Jamie for part of that time) while mom had surgery for cancer.

During the course of getting x-rays to follow up on her broken ribs from January of this year, they discovered the cancer in her left lung. Extremely luckily, it was operable and she did not need to have radiation or chemo. She chose to have treatment at the cancer hospital in Silverdale, about an hour away from their house.

The surgery went well, at least in terms of getting all the cancer out. It had only spread to one of the 21 lymph nodes they removed, which is an excellent indicator that it hadn’t gone any further into her body.

Dad and I stayed at a hotel in Silverdale while Mom was in the hospital. I tried to stay active by running around the lake in the mornings; we tried to find vegan restaurants that my dad could eat at (not easy); and we visited Mom as often as we could, though of course she slept a lot and wasn’t feeling up to visitors much of the time.

Recovery after she came home was extremely rough for her. Surgical site pain, nerve pain, and difficulty regaining her breathing functions all contributed to a very bad time of it. The anesthesiologist did a poor job on her intubation and paralyzed half of her vocal cords. And after I left, she continued to go downhill and had to be hospitalized for pneumonia for a week in Port Angeles. I later learned how close a call it was, which is not something I like to think about.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about her and my dad’s insistence on having a full house (all the kids and our families coming to visit just a few days after she got home from the hospital), and we tried to keep the environment as calm as possible, but there’s only so calm it can be with that many people plus two dogs in the house. I think that she wanted everyone to be together, which I understand.

Mom didn’t feel like eating much at all, but we tried to keep her eating small bites here and there and drinking water. I did the best I could to cook up a bunch of vegan freezer meals for my dad so he could easily microwave something he could eat during Mom’s recovery.

Now that it’s months later, she’s doing fine. She had to have a very painful treatment on her vocal cords where they basically pumped the equivalent of lip plumper into her vocal cords using dozens of tiny needle stabs. The purpose was to give a firm surface for the working half of the cords to vibrate against and give her her voice back, and it definitely worked. She was told that was temporary, that it may only last a few months, but six months later she still sounds nearly normal and has been told that her nerve function is actually returning, which they thought was not possible.