Progress Backwards

There's not a lot of news... beyond the frustrating bureaucracy of healthcare organizations, miscommunication between doctors, their peers, and other healthcare staff, and labs and procedures performed well beyond promised initiation/result time. These things are worthy of retrospect, but not in the timeframe I currently have present.

My mom is progressing fairly well with chemotherapy. Her pleural effusion is slowly shrinking, her spleen is shrinking (she can finally bend over to pick up things (!) -- except now she gets vertigo when she bends over), she's losing all her hair (I mean, all of it, like her arm hairs), and getting weaker, but the lymph nodes seem to be smaller.

Her bloodcounts are spiraling downhill; she has blood labs drawn and run every few days, and managed to stabilize for a while, but then started dropping again, so she required a blood/platelet transfusion this past weekend. Unfortunately, as chemotherapy tries to target foreign-antigen cells (cancerous cells), they also manage to suppress her normal marrow function.

So we're progressing against cancer, but at such a terrible cost. People wince and turn faces at the idea of infusing these quite literally poisonous toxic drugs, almost disbelieving that such terrifying drugs do the one thing they want most -- elongate life.

Is it worth it? Survivors are unified in their answer. As for the rest, who knows...