A day with the cute old people:

Today I went to Winston-Salem to accompany my parents to my mother's cancer appointment. For those of you who know these dear folks, here is an update on how it went:

Her surgery is scheduled for next Monday. She and Daddy will go again this Friday, for her "pre-op" -- although I always thought pre-op was RIGHT before surgery, as in, put you in your little gown, plug needles in your arm and whisk you away down the hall. Apparently not.

Her cancer was/is a sarcoma. Adam did a little reading online today, and apparently sarcoma is a pretty aggressive cancer, which would explain why this mass on her forearm grew so quickly. Sarcomas also are only about 1% of all cancers, so they are pretty rare. Sarcomas, if they spread, do not spread to the lymph nodes; they spread to the chest, by which I suppose the doctor means the lungs. So one of the first things they did today is take a chest x-ray to evaluate whether there is any indication of cancer in her chest. They also took blood for her blood work (finally!) and did an EKG.

Mother and Daddy are both very upbeat. They had a nice stay at the Hawthorne Inn, which is a hotel/conf. center owned by the hospital, so they give a generous reduction in price for patients who stay there. And they offer wonderful shuttle service from the hotel to the hospital and back. Very nice. Wake Forest Hospital is a maze of floors, breezeways, construction, oddly shaped buildings. I helped navigate us around.

The surgeon will reopen the wound and remove some of the muscle. Mother should not have much reduction in her mobility, however. I think he said, though, that if the chest x-ray indicates cancer there, plans could change very quickly.

Well, I'm off to the airport for a week-long trip to England with my students. I'll be blogging from there, hopefully. I wish I could be here for Mother's surgery, but she'll just have to soldier on without me!

Love to you all - please pray.