Diagnosis

Mom came home last week, the day I left to come back to Chapel Hill. She's been at home, weathering Katrina (no damage to the house, fortunately), getting stronger and waiting for the final diagnosis. She visited the doctor today, and almost all the results of the tests they've done are in and show that she has Multiple Myeloma, a cancer of the plasma which is treatable but not curable. She starts chemotherapy right away. The dosage is supposedly not enough to cause her to lose hair or get very sick, but it does last 12 months. Patients usually respond very quickly with the symptoms (severe back pain the major one) reducing very quickly. My parents are going to take it day by day. That's the only way we got through the year of chemo I did in High School. That and many prayers, so keep them coming.

As I begin a new semester, adjust to Rebecca having a job (which she starts on Tuesday!), digest everything from this summer and make sense of all that's happening with my mom, life feels a bit out of whack. I've just written and deleted many attempts to explain how I feel, but it's not coming out right so I'll just end with the last two lines of an E.E. Cummings poem:

life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis