Yesterday was my mom’s 69th birthday. Go mom!

Today she finds out if she has cancer or not.

You know, most birthday cards become extremely offensive when you are looking for a birthday card for someone who could get a huge mortality check the day after their birthday. It’s all cards like “haha! you’re so old! you’re gonna die!” It’s really horrible!

I opted for a card about drinking beer.

My brother is shaving his head for children’s cancer. Whether this will improve his haircut or not, I cannot say, but if you would like to donate click here.

For those of you who have asked, my mom called today after her bone scan and she is CANCER FREE!! Woohoo. Her doctor said she should go home and drink 10 beers. Any doctor who advocates binge drinking in the face of cancer is a-OK with me. As my mom pointed out yesterday, both of my parents have had non-hereditary cancer, which has to be oddswise, well, odd.

In response I am getting my mom one of these Fuck Cancer bracelets. I don’t think she’d wear the tshirts, but I am thinking of getting one myself.

So I have been doing a fair bit of research on my mom’s condition. She officially has Hodgkin’s disease. I had mainly done online research, but I thought I would check out a real book about it.

My library has one. One from 1972. And 3 biographies and 2 fiction books. Yeehaw. Totally helpful.

Also, my library has an exemption from the city noise ordinance. They can begin construction at 5:45 AM. Considering part of the construction involves a lot of backing up service vehicles outside my bedroom window, I was less than ecstatic to find this out.

So while I generally love you, public library, today I am not finding much @ my library.

So I am trying to find the quickest way to let people know this.  And I know talking to you in person about this only makes the other person feel awkward and not know what to say, which I totally understand.  So for the both of us this is how I am going about this.

My mom was recently diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, maybe at stage 2.  We won’t know until she has a biopsy.  In case you don’t know (I didn’t until an hour of mainlining Medline), it’s a fairly slow acting cancer, relatively, and fairly treatable it seems.  There aren’t any known causes, although finding out that it correlates with hair dye usage gave me pause.  At this point we won’t know anything for a while, so it’s particularly unhelpful to worry.  This is not stopping me however.  Actually right now I am more angry since my mom has been experiencing classic symptoms for well over a year now, which I find terribly infuriating that this wasn’t caught earlier.  Everything I have read points to more symptoms=the worse it is, which is also freaking me out a bit although I know I should stop searching and just wait for a diagnosis.

You know, sometimes having excellent searching skills is sort of a curse!

My mom has been a smoker since a very young age and is particularly annoyed at having a cancer not caused by smoking.  She feels like if she did it to herself, she would at least feel like she had some control in the matter, I guess.  So, although she quit for 3 days, she is back to smoking.  This, in the particularly bizarre way of my family, is totally a good sign to me, since she can’t be so worried about it that she would stop smoking.  Weird, I know, but true.
Weirdest of all is that I had to talk to my dad about it, who has been in remission for over 10 years now.  My parents don’t talk at all, and I was just a kid when he had cancer, so I feel oddly unfair freaking out about my mom’s case, when I didn’t so much when my dad had cancer, mainly cuz he didn’t tell me anything about it (and I didn’t have an internet connection) and cuz at 13 no one thinks their parents are going to die.  Can you make a parent jealous by caring more about one’s cancer than the other’s?  I don’t think there’s an Emily Post manual on this.
And generally I feel like I should eat superfoods morning, noon, and night now.  sheesh.

No comments, b/c saying stuff isn’t terribly helpful at the moment, but in case I am out of it or incommunicado, this is why.