This is a paraphrase of a comment made by a nurse I met this week, and it kind of works perfectly for how I’m feeling tonight.

The nurse was one of a number of medical professionals I met while my mom was in the hospital. She had a fall Monday night that led to a visit to the emergency room, which led to the discovery of a mass in the right hemisphere of her brain. This is never a good thing to hear, but we were encouraged by the doctor who said that the mass could be a result of a number of things – infection, stroke… we clung to the idea that it could be one of those things and not a tumor. The word “cancer” just wasn’t going to be an option.

Well, unfortunately, we don’t always have a lot of control over our options. The good news is that when they did an MRI on Tuesday and a full-body CT scan, they didn’t find any other evidence of tumors in her abdominal or chest cavities. It seemed that the mass was limited to her brain. Today, however, after performing a biopsy, the neurosurgeon told my sister and I that the mass is what we had feared, brain cancer.

It’s called a glioma, and there’s not a lot of happy information associated with this thing when you do a search online. But until we get the pathology reports back in a few days we won’t know exactly what we’re dealing with.

I am thinking I’ll need a lot of time to vent, regardless of the prognosis, so I’ll be writing a lot. Maybe here, but maybe not here. I appreciate your thoughts and prayers for my mom and those who love her as we head down this road.

And may I just say, when I took the job at a cancer support organization, I didn’t think it would require first-hand experience… what’s up with THAT???