Bad News, Sad News, What to Choose

My mother has received a platelet transfusion every day this week and one blood transfusion yesterday. If you can get there to donate yours, please do... they are only able to store platelets for about 5 days so they are in high demand for cancer patients. Find it in your heart to donate your platelets and blood whenever you can, if you can. It breaks my heart that I can't. 

Results of her bone marrow test were given, of course, when I wasn't there yesterday afternoon but I did learn some information when I got there. M's leukemia has not gone in to remission as a result of her most recent chemo session. I am unsure of the change in percentage of her bone marrow being leukemia but all I know is that the change is not significant enough for her eligibility to receive a transplant. This is the bad news. 

The sad news is that her choices told her yesterday were (From RWJ) 1. Go home. 2. Go through a different round of chemo, there is a 70% chance it may disrupt/destroy one or more of her major organs and a 20% chance of it even doing anything positive - and he wants her to start it TONIGHT or 3. A clinical trial which consists of a Chinese Herbal Root that would be given intravenously. (Some people in my family want to try this, others are totally against it). 

What to choose? I can't say. She won't say. I did suggest that she try elsewhere like Sloan Kettering or the Cancer Center.  My aunt and I have made an appointment to speak to a nurse from the Cancer Center in Philadelphia on Friday night over the phone and give them all the pertinent information related to M's case. They are supportive that they can treat her further, but I want to discuss it first [with everyone]. One thing we are all agreeing on (except M) is that she is not going home to do nothing. 

I will be going to the hospital this afternoon to talk to M and her doctor again to ask the ridiculous list of questions that it seems only I can come up with and remember. More later. 

Needed: Prayers, blood, love and platelets. Always, JB 

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” 

― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex