it's okay.

so, as many of you know, today went fine. but i didn't know that until later on.

i got really nervous this morning, while i was getting ready to leave, and, like an idiot, i drank some coffee, which made me feel all anxious and jittery, which was awesome when added to my preexisting nervousness.

i drove to ucsd because my mom doesn't like driving in the city much these days and i drive in everyday, so it's no big whoop for me. the drive was fine. i missed my morning radio shows, which made me feel like an old person, and also made me wonder how superior i really am when i am addicted to radio shows. i mean, is that really superior to tv? and then i realized, yes, it is. i am still morally superior. 

so that was a relief.

anyway, we drove it, parked in the lot i parked in for mom's surgery. this lot was the site of the best thing that happened to me in 2007 so far, when the cashier booth was fortuitously unmanned on new year's day, the day of our departure from ucsf after a 5 day stay, and i thus didn't have to pay the $100 for parking that i had been anxiously anticipating. 

nothing miraculous happened today, but it was a sturdy, safe, reliable place to park. ucsf hospital is the freezy-frozenest place in the city, it feels like, and we almost froze in the teeny walk from car to hospital. we got all the way up to the 8th floor to be told we needed to be across the street on the 3rd floor. i had a feeling i should have checked the logistics myself, since mom is really, really foggy on details these days, but she had assured me she wrote everything down. it wasn't a big deal. 

(having mom be such an old lady right now is forcing me to be more patient, in a good way. it reminds me of how fast i walk, how fast i eat. mom takes FOREVER to eat. or get out of the car. or...pretty much anything. and it drives me crazy, but it drives me crazy because it's really scary to me, and since i am not one to shrink from fear, i am going to get over it. she's my mom and she's dying - whether from cancer or because we are getting closer to death every day we're alive - and i have time to wait for her to collect herself, or chew her cud.)

the mri machine was in a portable outside, and i sat in an office chair reading while she got scanned. i had a really intense flashback of the first mri. that one was the morning after she was admitted to marin general the very first time. like, basically the crack of dawn about 36 hours after the whole thing got rolling. she was a bit more lucid than the day before, but still had basically no idea what was going on. i was bleary and tired and still absolutely in shock, and also still in my manic watchdog mode, afraid to let her our of my sight lest she die suddenly as i peed. we bundled her up under a gazillion heated blankets (i'd like a blanket warmer for xmas, i think. amazing.) and then the trasport guy wheeled her through the hospital and out to another freezing, rickety portable for her mri. the mri tech then was a lady who knew my mom, like about 90% of the staff who worked on her. i was really scared about her mri, because she's terribly claustrophobic, and i was worried about her not understanding what was happening, or knowing why she was going in the creepy tube. i spent the entire time basically rocking in my seat, peering anxiously into the mri room, staring intenting at her hospital-sock-clad feet for some discernible sign of a panic attack. luckily she was so zonked on morphine and having a softball sized tumor in her brain that she was totally fine, but i was a total mess.

so, i got anxious during the mri today. no rocking or moaning in the back of my throat, but a fair amount of attempting to detect signs of mom losing her shit. the machine was much smaller. (she said it pushed her shoulders in and that she came close to crying this time because it was so close. then, because she is my mom and this is why i am the way i am, she decided that crying would stop the mri, and she'd have to do the whole thing from the beginning all over again, so she would be better served by just sucking it up. fisher ladies HOLLA.) 

i watched the scans as they showed up on the machine and they looked fucking terrible. if healthy normal brains are grey, like, a quarter of her brain was snow white on the scans. from every direction, in every image, it looked, seriously, like there were equal parts brain and tumor. i asked the mri tech if the white part was tumor and he said probably. he was really quick to backtrack, and say that he didn't know, it wasn't for sure, it could be anything, but i think he thought i would lose it or something. i ended up consoling him, making him feel better. it's okay, i said, it's not a surprise. we chatted for a while and he was very nice. he really wanted to make me feel better and not get too upset. 

but i did.

i started to get really upset.

obviously the possibility of this scan being really, really bad was something i was thought a fair amount about. the chances of chemo and radiation kicking mom's cancer's ass was slim enough that it wasn't even in the realm of rational possibility. so, that means the spectrum of options had to be a range of levels of regrowth, from a little to a lotlotlot. so, it was alot. a real, real, really lot lot. so mom was for sure dying soon. like, no medicine or surgery could every do anything with that. i mean, it looked like a matter of months or something. which i had thought about before. when everything happened in december, i was kinda prepared for her to die right then. but the last few months of things feeling pretty normal were a fake out. her at the farm, going to her choir rehearsals and gigs with allen, me working and thinking about the future and the dog...it felt like the future was looking normal, if not bright.

but these scans were so not good. 

and i remembered that mom wasn't ever, no way at all, going to even see my kids during her lifetime and that is always enough to make me cry on normal, not-falling-apart-and-filled-with- anxiousness-and-fear days. i cried some, but not too much, because i didn't want the mri guy to feel bad. i went outside and tried to call shannon, but no one answered. he was getting our new bed from the delivery guys and getting it set up and stuff. so, i cried a eensy-weensy bit, and wondered if i should tell mom before the doctor told her, and then i went back in for more waiting.

i told mom when she came out, and we were both sad. it was so cold, so we linked arms and walked back across the street to the neurosurgery offices. 

(on a side note, ucsf is a good place to see both people who are crazy fucked up physically and good looking single dudes. so there's something for everyone.)

we waited a really long time to meet the doctor. like, easily an hour. but we had brought books and stuff so we hung out and admired the truly awe-inspiring view from that set of offices. the windows face off the hill that ucsf is perched on, and you can look out over the park and out to the ocean and off to the haight and cole valley. amazing and really peaceful, which is thoughtful for a place that deals with people dealing with totally lame, scary stuff. i have appreciated that view on many, keyed up and scared moments. 

the new doctor is young. dr parsa, the neurosurgeon, was probably in his early 40s, but this guy seemed like he was....35? young. clean cut, nice looking in a j crew, 'nana 'pub way. totally not at all warm, but he made up for his lack of warmth by his focus on us and our situation. he wasn't a hand grasper or one for deep sympathetic eye contact, but he had a plan, and he explained everything really clearly for my mom. he answered he questions patiently and fully. 

oh, and his reading of the scans totally refuted what that poor mri tech said, which is why this guy is a fucking neurooncologist who makes a billion dollars a second, and mri tech makes 50K a year. dr butowski (sorry about your childhood taunting, dr BUTT-OW-ski. hehheh.) said it looked like there was definitely regrowth, and nothing that could be easily operated on (which was a relief because dr. cuntface had suggested, without ever LOOKING at the scans, that mom may need another craniotomy, which scared the shit out of her) and that we would just have mom do more of the same chemo meds, only on a higher dosage for a shorter period of time. so, 5 days on and 23 days off. the regrowth was nothing to start picking out her headstone for, and this is not close to the last option. so, we've got a while before it gets to the 'lick this psychedelic toad and cross your fingers' stage. 

so, the appointment was actually kinda good, and a relief, and i was glad to have been wrong, and we celebrated with pizzeria delphina and bi-rite ice cream for me and tartine cafe au lait for mom. then we walked to my work and mom met talla and talla was charming and lovely and gave my mom a shirt that she looks adorable in. lizzi, my new co-worker (!!!) was there, too, so we all got to chat some before mom and i headed back to marin. 

traffic starting in mill valley sucked balls, and again reenforced my nervous thoughts that marin is basically la norte. mom was nice and let me listen to 'all things considered,' and we caught an interview with rufus wainwright, who mom is a new, big fan of. she felt really hip.

and we came home to my lovely clean house (which my unbelievable boyfriend cleaned top to bottom yesterday, on top of doing all the laundry - and i cried because i appreciated it so much) and a new HUGEMUNGOUS bed. it's gorgeous and a bit of a monster. i am in love already.

now we're going to see 'knocked up' and we'll hopefully laugh a lot.

i want to sum things up with some observation about life and the ups and downs and stuff, but i;m pretty wrung out from those very ups and downs and i am going to refrain. you know what i mean anyway.