Recovery Process

My mom came home from the hospital yesterday, she's doing well but very tired. My mom and I like to get a good ten hours of sleep every night.  As anyone who has been there knows, in the hospital she was woken up at least every hour by nurses and doctors checking on her progress. It will be very nice for her to be at home in her own bed, with no one but my dad, Peter, David, George, Lucy and I to bother her :) 

Lucky for her the rest of us were at church for a few hours and we all LOVE to take Sunday naps so the house will be pretty quiet. Although....I thought someone needed to sacrifice some of their time during church to make sure she had everything she needed to be comfortable. Since I've been gone all week I stepped up and slept in so I could be near her. It's the least I could do.

We got the pathology report back early yesterday morning and it all looked good. They found more DCIS (stage zero cancer) but didn't find any more invasive cancer. There are still some factors working against her (like her "youth") but it appears unlikely that she will have to do the kind of chemotherapy that will make her hair fall out. No need to find an adequate eye brow replacement. Hooray!

She won't be able to drive for a few weeks, oh shoot, no carpools for her to drive or errands to run. She's got about a thousand pills to take, my dad is attempting to keep a log of when she takes what since we can't really count on either of them to remember on their own. My mom did say that the nurses were asking her how her pain was and if she had any other discomfort, they had pills for just about everything. But when my mom said she just had the creeps from all the tubes and poking and prodding, and asked if they had anything for that, they came up empty. 

Here's the funny part, she'll be using a walker to get around for a little while. Good practice for when she is 95 ... which we are absolutely counting on her reaching. George was imitating her walking around all hunched over, I took a picture but am not allowed to post it. Enjoy the mental picture.

Overall she's doing remarkably well for just having an 8 hour surgery. It sounded pretty unpleasant. I couldn't believe she had to have other people give her a shower. There are just so many little parts of this that sound unbearable just by themselves, but she continues to take
everything pretty much in stride. She's a great exmple of how to deal with hard, humbling, and just uncomfortable stuff, something that I am terrible at.

I want to say thanks again to everyone for all the help. I was worried how things would go while I was out of town but I didn't have to worry at all. Meals were covered and George and Lucy were always taken care of. My dad could be at the hospital without stressing about home and I didn't feel like I had to call everyone every hour. So thanks everyone for all the help.  

My mom won't be getting out of the house for weeks, but hopefully she will be up for posting at some point in that time.  I'm sure she'll have some good stories from the hospital stay...well, maybe 'good' isn't the right word. For now she's just trying to get her strength back. She's not quite up to having visitors but appreciates all the prayers and support.