Bittersweet

I know my posts aren’t happy, but this is my therapy and I cannot thank the people who read and follow me enough. The fact that I am able to document how I’m feeling and knowing that someone is out there and understanding is a relief and better therapy than I ever imagined. So thank you.

I officially have 3 days until I head back to school and am 8 hours away from my family and mom. Don’t get me wrong, I love school and I can’t wait to go back and see everyone, but I feel like I need to be home to help out.

So, for about 2 years after my mom was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer everything was semi normal. For MBC there is nothing that we can do to get rid of it or put her back in remission. She will forever have MBC and we can only hope to suppress the spreading and not let it get to any vital organs.

She took medicine orally and had shots every two weeks. The hormonal treatments were working for a little bit, but eventually the scans showed progression. We had our many ups and downs with the medicines that she was taking, with every few blood results coming back with numbers higher than the last.

A week before I came home for Christmas break we got great news. Her blood results came back and they had lowered a crazy amount from her last results! The medicine had to be working!

With the good news raising our spirits my dad and mom took me to the next doctors appointment, 8 days before Christmas. The news received was very far from a Christmas miracle and was completely opposite of what we hoped. Turns out that the blood results were completely wrong from what we had thought and that the medicine wasn’t working. The cancer was spreading and had spread farther into my mothers liver.

Long story short, my mother has to start a weekly chemo treatments now to try to fight off the spreading. Chemo is the LAST thing she wants.

Even though we live in a small town, many people don’t realize that she still has cancer. My mother looks great and is healthy, and people think that it was something that she fought off and beat again.

She cried when she realized she had to do chemo again, and quite frankly, possibly the rest of her life. That was probably the hardest thing to listen to. When the doctors walked in and explained that it had spread and “pretty significantly”, it was like a bomb dropped in the room.

My mother is starting chemo next Thursday and I am leaving on Monday. I won’t be here to help drive her back and forth. I won’t be here to help my  brothers or my dad. I wont be here to help her do her makeup when she loses her eyebrows and eyelashes. I won’t be here to comfort her when she looks in the mirror.

I am excited to get back to the college life and to see all my friends, but I feel like I have aged 10 years over this break and I’m not really sure how I feel about going back.

Its a little bittersweet I guess.