I haven’t updated for a while. Which isn’t necessarily anything new. But this time there’s a good reason for it.

I believe I’ve talked about it here, but last year my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Over the course of the last year and a half she’s been receiving treatment for that – first with chemo, then radiation, ending up on a treatment of Tarceva, a daily pill that has actually helped to reduce the tumors in her lungs drastically.

Unfortunately, she also has metastases in her bones. This hasn’t responded to the treatment and has spread as her lung cancer has dwindled.

Since July she has been having spells of headaches and nausea that eventually became so bad that she was barely active and couldn’t eat on a regular basis. The initial MRI showed nothing suspect, but her condition continued to deteriorate.

All this led to last Thursday (when she was supposed to get another MRI) when she had a seizure. In a stroke of amazing luck, my father was there with her when it happened and he helped her otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. Since then she’s been in the hospital.

Another MRI showed that she had hydrocephalus. Cerebrospinal fluid was accumulating in her ventricles and pressing on her brain.

This past weekend was tough as she was heavily medicated as they tried to stabilize her seizures. Thankfully, on Monday they were able to start treating her with radiation therapy and with a spinal tap which helped to reduce the fluid accumulation. Since then her headaches have stopped and she’s been feeling much better, though her stomach is still a bit touchy (which would seem natural after weeks of not being able to eat solid food).

It looks like she will be able to come home tomorrow. Things will have to change, of course. She can’t move around like she used to. She’ll most likely have to sleep on the ground floor because of this. But she is coming home and she’ll be out of the hospital and she’ll be better able to have something approximating a normal life.

To say that this has been hard on the family is a massive understatement. I can’t think of many things worse than watching someone you love deeply, someone who has always taken care of you, subjected to something as horrible and as painful as this. But we’ve been doing our best to be there for her and with her and we will continue to do that for as long as it’s needed.

In the meantime, if I’m a little quiet, or unresponsive, you know the reason why.

Thank you to everyone who has expressed their sympathies and have offered their thoughts, prayers and well wishes. In a time like this, it’s humbling to realize how much love and support I have and it’s something I continue to be awed by. I suppose it’s one of life’s contradictions that in the middle of terrible misfortune, you can be simultaneously confronted with how lucky you are.