I saw my mom in March when we drove to Amarillo for spring break. She had lost a lot of weight since she was down in Austin for last Thanksgiving, and she seemed pretty sick. She attributed the weight loss to heavy work schedule at the ballet, and she had just been diagnosed with a kidney infection and was a few days into the antibiotics. By the end of the week there seemed like a little improvement, but things seemed worse than a kidney infection.
There were a couple more rounds of doctor visits until they did a biopsy and found out it was uterine cancer... which they characterized as slow growing, but they didn't know the extent of the spread.
Mom didn't have any family in Amarillo and my brother and I are in Austin, so I decided to drive up and bring her down for treatment.
We did see a gyn oncologist in Amarillo who wanted to operate and remove the uterus, but I thought it would be best to have all the treatment in Austin, so we headed back.
The gyn oncologist in Austin did a physical exam and ordered a CT scan and MRI, which showed that there was a significant spreading of the disease. She labeled it Stage 4a Uterine cancer and said surgery to remove the cancer was not possible.
She also said that the way that the cancer had spread made Chemo and radiation treatments tricky. She wanted to do surgery to bypass parts of the intestine that had been compromised, before starting the chemo.
This meant meeting with a cardiologist to get cleared for surgery and a surgical oncologist to talk about the surgery scheduled for this last Wednesday (9th). On Tuesday we got a call saying that they had consulted other doctors and decided it was best to skip that surgery for now and do Chemo first... but Wed. was still on... they'll just put a port in her chest to facilitate the chemo. Outpatient surgery... home by dinner... meeting later to discuss chemo schedule.
Wednesday didn't go as planned, her blood volume was low and they needed to give here 2 pints of blood in a transfusion... which takes 6 hours... overnight stay. There was concern in the morning about blood loss so they scheduled a procedure to look into her stomach with a camera to see if there were any ulcers... That scan was clean and meant that they would probably need to do a colonoscopy to continue searching for the source of the blood loss. Prep for a colonoscopy takes some time.
There is another problem. The cancer is surrounding the line leaving one of her kidneys and it is causing the kidney to swell because the kidney is not draining properly. The proposed solution was to put a stent in the blockage and open it up again. That was scheduled for this morning(Friday) and didn't work. So now she is in another surgery to try and unblock it from the top down instead of the bottom up.... if that doesn't work they are going to put a drain tube in to relieve the pressure on the kidney and come back in a couple weeks and try again when the swelling has gone down.
There were a couple more rounds of doctor visits until they did a biopsy and found out it was uterine cancer... which they characterized as slow growing, but they didn't know the extent of the spread.
Mom didn't have any family in Amarillo and my brother and I are in Austin, so I decided to drive up and bring her down for treatment.
We did see a gyn oncologist in Amarillo who wanted to operate and remove the uterus, but I thought it would be best to have all the treatment in Austin, so we headed back.
The gyn oncologist in Austin did a physical exam and ordered a CT scan and MRI, which showed that there was a significant spreading of the disease. She labeled it Stage 4a Uterine cancer and said surgery to remove the cancer was not possible.
She also said that the way that the cancer had spread made Chemo and radiation treatments tricky. She wanted to do surgery to bypass parts of the intestine that had been compromised, before starting the chemo.
This meant meeting with a cardiologist to get cleared for surgery and a surgical oncologist to talk about the surgery scheduled for this last Wednesday (9th). On Tuesday we got a call saying that they had consulted other doctors and decided it was best to skip that surgery for now and do Chemo first... but Wed. was still on... they'll just put a port in her chest to facilitate the chemo. Outpatient surgery... home by dinner... meeting later to discuss chemo schedule.
Wednesday didn't go as planned, her blood volume was low and they needed to give here 2 pints of blood in a transfusion... which takes 6 hours... overnight stay. There was concern in the morning about blood loss so they scheduled a procedure to look into her stomach with a camera to see if there were any ulcers... That scan was clean and meant that they would probably need to do a colonoscopy to continue searching for the source of the blood loss. Prep for a colonoscopy takes some time.
There is another problem. The cancer is surrounding the line leaving one of her kidneys and it is causing the kidney to swell because the kidney is not draining properly. The proposed solution was to put a stent in the blockage and open it up again. That was scheduled for this morning(Friday) and didn't work. So now she is in another surgery to try and unblock it from the top down instead of the bottom up.... if that doesn't work they are going to put a drain tube in to relieve the pressure on the kidney and come back in a couple weeks and try again when the swelling has gone down.
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