Making progress?

Well mam had her much anticipated visit with the oncologist at the QE hospital in Gateshead this week. We thought that blood tests last time around would reveal this time if the cancer had spread, so I was quietly dreading Tuesday as I guess mam and the rest of the family were too.

As ever, work kept me VERY busy and at 4pm came an email from my older sister, who'd had a phone call from our brother - who'd gone with mam to her appointment.

Basically they hadn't done the tests we thought to see if there's been any spread. There's a slight suspicion that it may have spread to her colon - but from what I've read of ovarian cancer, it's not unusual for that to happen. She'll have her hysterectomy on Mon 30 November and stay in for a full week. When they do the hysterectomy they'll also see what cancer 'hotspots' if any they can see and remove what they can. If it HAS spread to the colon they'll remove the affected section if they can, she might need a colostomy bag temporarily until they can repair the 'break', but apparently that's the absolute worst case scenario...it might not even come to that, fingers crossed.

Bro said mam coped well with it but is more bothered by the thought of a colostomy bag than the thought of the cancer, apparently!

So in a way I was relieved to hear all that - my approach is to expect the worst and anything else is a bonus, so I'd kind of braced myself for much, much worse. I think personally I'd rather take that approach than hope for the best then have to deal with bad news - I've had enough kicks in the stomach with this so far, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster. Everyone has their own way of dealing with things and that's mine.

So now we know the date of the op, we can start planning ahead. As it's not for almost a month, as a family I guess we can have a few weeks of relative 'normality' and we should probably make the most of that, because who knows what 30th November and the weeks and months after it will bring. Hubs and I have long been booked into a hotel in Chester for the weekend immediately before the op, which obviously we'd have been prepared to take a loss on, if we were needed up north.

Next target? Work out with my siblings how we dovetail our post-op visits up north...