11/09/10 - Update

After a couple of full days in Charlotte, and having visited with mom's neurosurgeon yesterday, I figured an update is in order. At the risk of being overly blunt, I will try to keep my thoughts as brief as possible.

Mom's appointment yesterday was the last in a series of meetings with her primary doctors. While each of the previous meetings was to specifically address the condition of the wound and whether it could be fixed, in every instance the message was consistent: that there was little she could reasonably expect to gain from continuing with intense medical intervention.

Yesterday's meeting with the neurosurgeon (who is also affiliated with the plastic surgeon and hence had a role in the management of the wound), while originally intended to be simply a follow up to close the loop on the wound management program, ultimately became much more. The very short of it is that by the end of the meeting, mom believed the doctor had (a) confirmed what the other doctors had told her insofar as it not being worth further aggressively treating the wound, but also (b) that at this point there was little upside to trying new approaches to treating the tumor (whose presumed progression has recently led to mom's losing a significant amount of her physical skills and "independence"). In short, in mom's mind (and I would not disagree), the doctor was gently suggesting to her that it would likely be a good time to shift to the next phase of the battle - one that focuses on maximizing the quality of the remaining life she has left.

And so it is in the final phase of mom's fight that we now find ourselves entering . . . a place towards which, as much as we wanted to believe in our hearts and minds that we would be the very rare exception that would be able to beat this nasty disease, we have been moving for the past 15 months.

We will be meeting with folks from hospice on Thursday to learn more about this palliative program, one that mom has for obvious reasons had little or no interest in discussing since the onset of treatment (and, of course, one which we had little desire to press upon her). The meeting has been framed so far as one that will help us learn to better manage her quality of life through the final weeks, and, hopefully, months of her life, but that has not yet been labeled (to her) as "hospice". This being because its underlying premise and framework, while very acceptable and comforting in our minds, are currently at odds with mom's preconceived and uninformed notions of what hospice is about. We feel it better to have prepared her to receive folks who want to help her live well over her remaining time, regardless of its label, and hope that she will, after having heard the spiel, be able to put her preconceived notions about hospice to bed once and for all and embrace it as have the rest of us. We shall see.

So, I hope that this (I imagine distressing) post has allowed you - whose demonstrated love for mom is the one true clearly wonderful thing that we gained as a result of all of this horribleness - to understand where we are and to allow you to prepare to move with mom through this final phase of her life. One that will, we trust, give us enough time to allow us to communicate to her just how wonderful and influential she has been in our lives, and how much she is and will be forever loved.

Love to all,

Ted