Happy 4th to everyone!

Here’s the home page. It’s a great resource. [Run by doctors.] I hope your mom will be much more comfortable now that she’s home. Take care -

I hear nothing but good about knee replacements. I hope my mom will be enjoying life again soon. Been a rough few months for her, becoming a widow rather suddenly after 54 years of marriage and now this.

I’m nasty-minded enough to think that the hospital has a record of who was working that night, and your mom’s records might show what personnel treated her.

And I’d like to throttle the brain-dead moron who first came up with the “rate your pain on a scale of” idea (which just this past week caused a miscommunication that almost led a doctor to remove all restrictions on my hand injury that still causes me to yelp in pain if I so much as grab a hairbrush wrong - not at all the same category as what your mother is going through, but another example of how hare-brained the whole “rate your pain” thing can be when mis-used).

Here’s to hoping that they get your mother’s pain control right this time, and that the test results come back with the more treatable breast cancer (imagine that - *hoping* for breast cancer - but it is what it is, right?)

My thoughts are with you and your family.

Since early May I had taken her to the doctor and to the ER many times, complaining of incredible pain in her sternum area. Over and over they diagnosed the wrong things, and told her to take Advil. Even though she’d had cancer twice in the last year, most recently a mastectomy in January, no one did or suggested a CT scan.

This time, the vomiting tipped them off, and they checked her blood and found sky-high calcium levels. Then they scanned her and found multiple areas of bone destruction, presumably from cancer. They admitted her immediately for a week of treatment to reduce her calcium level, and get her hellish pain under control, as well as do a number of painful diagnostic tests.

Assuming this is her breast cancer metastasizing, there are treatments and we’ll be looking at the likelihood of at least some relief and some good time with her, but it it’s something else, like lymphoma or multiple myeloma, we’re looking at a hospice situation.

The most likely thing is that it is the breast cancer, so we’re hoping for the biopsy results to tell us that. We’ll know next week sometime. In the meantime, I’m just taking it hour by hour, and glad to have my mom home again, not nauseated, and with her pain mostly controlled.

By the way, the Advil has been replaced with a 25 mg fentanyl patch, dilaudid and tramadol. Which I wish I could shove down the throat of the ER nurse who when my mom told him her pain was a 10 on a scale of 10, told her that it “couldn’t be a 10, because if it was, you’d be on the floor writhing and screaming.” Well guess what, you jerk? Bone cancer is a 10. Thanks to your little lecture, you not only intimidated her into under-evaluating her pain ever since, but you deprived her doctors of valuable information that might have led to an earlier diagnosis and also made sure she’d get inadequate pain control. If I remembered your name I’d report you.

And yes, I do know anger is one of the stages of grief.