Shitty news

[garnigal]

My mom has been in hospital for a week. She's been sick for weeks, but thought it was just related to a vertigo syndrome she has. Finally was losing too much weight and not drinking enough, so Dad took her up and they kept her, waiting for a free bed in our major hospital to do some pretty aggressive testing.

Got the diagnosis yesterday - multiple myelomoa, which is cancer of the plasma cells. She starts treatment as soon as possible, and that treatment may include everything from chemo to stem cell therapy to a bone marrow transplant.

It's treatable, but incurable. 49% of people hit the 5 year survival marker, but most of those are diagnosed early. For Mom's stage (I'm guessing based on her symptoms), the average life span after diagnosis is 29 months.

Hopefully she is well above average.

Comments

Re: FOAF

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

She went to pick up meds tonight, and the volunteer at the checkin desk saw her forms and said "Myeloma?" They confirmed and he grinned. He was diagnosed 14 years ago, and is getting a second stem cell transplant sometime this year. So that gave us all some hope. We just hope she responds to treatment as well as he did.

She's home now, which is good. Hopefully she'll be able to do her injections locally (the tiny hospital in our town of 2900 is a regional cancer center. The hospital network is tricking the gov't into keeping all the small town hospitals open by making each one a 'specialty center'. Very clever!)

Re: FOAF

[velvetwhip.livejournal.com]

Okay, that hospital network is AWESOME! So glad that your local one is the cancer center.


Gabrielle

Re: FOAF

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

It certainly comes in handy given the family history on mom's side.

Re: FOAF

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Doctors spend a large part of every visit playing with their electronic devices anyway, which means that every Local MD can be on the line consulting Hotshot Fancy Superspecialist, who will have access to all of the patient's records.

Not the same kind of cancer, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been posting recently that when she was diagnosed, a Republican Senator said that she was obviously not long for this world, and good riddance. That was five years ago, and meanwhile the senator has died of a stroke.

Re: FOAF

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

RBG is an unstoppable force and an immovable object, all in one.

I used to work for a healthcare software company. Our software allowed medical images to be stored, compressed, moved around - all without any loss of image quality on uncompression. There are lots of companies that do the same thing, but just having the ability within the hospital network is a hell of a game changer.