His name is Tom

With the roller coaster of feelings this past week at one point we found humor. BigD is known for his bizarre humor, some would actually call it sick. I think it comes from so many years working in law enforcement and seeing unspeakable things. Sometimes you need humor to offset the sadness. and fear. Tonight BigD told me he has named the tumor. He is calling it Tom the tumor. Sounded out phonetically he is actually calling it Tomass a combo of Tom and mass. Clever guy that BigD. We saw the lung specialist yesterday and he wasn't able to bring up the CT scan on the computer because of the new change over to digital that just HAD to happen this week in the radiology dept. So, we left his office with really no more information than we had going in. We left at 3 and he was going to go to the hospital to look at the CT himself and discuss it with the radiologist. We didn't hear back from him so we split a bottle of x.anax and went to bed. I managed to wait till 11 this morning to make the call to his office and they told me he wouldn't be in till 1 so we waited a bit more. Finally at 3 the lung guy (who will from now on be known as LG) called. He discussed the scan with the radiologist, viewing it together, and the game plan they both feel is best is a needle aspiration followed by a PET scan if the aspiration doesn't tell them what they want to know. He told me that the lesion is at the base of the lung (which I knew since I have a copy of the report)and it is 4 centimeters. In the tumor world that is considered small. I don't know, I guess it is small for a tumor but a great size for say, a diamond. He said it is better to have a 4 cm lesion at the base of the lung than a 1 cm lesion in the middle. Whew, thank goodness for location analysis, I feel MUCH better now. not. We know that BigD has the asbestos screwing up the top of his lungs and my biggest fear is that this tumor is related to that. If it is, it is fatal. Now it is 8:30 on Friday night. This whole bad dream started two weeks ago. As of right now, we don't have a date or time for any of the upcoming tests/procedures so we get to spend another weekend thinking about the "what if's". When we were lying in bed last night we covered about every topic imaginable and if nothing else this whole event has been a rude awakening about how ill prepared we are if something happens to one of us. We did wills 25 years ago, before kids, before anything. That needs to be updated along with living wills, power of attorney etc. One of the 12 forms we had to fill out at the LG office was about all that....we just looked at each other and simultaneously said 'shit". Both SIL's (even the evil one!) came over today and brought ham, fattening potatoes, seven layer salad, brownies, coffee cake etc....if nothing else I won't be losing weight through this whole ordeal. We didn't plan on saying anything to the boys until we knew something concrete but since S1 came home from college today for a doctors appt for a sinus infection, he was here when I was talking to LG about BigD so I had to put on a positive spin and tell him that it was probably no big deal and then because he knew, I had to tell the other two so they wouldn't think I was hiding anything from them. I am hiding something though....I am hiding how worried I am. Being the child of a horrid alcoholic I learned very early on to hide my emotions so I can internalize my fears and they don't show to the outside world. Of course it reeks havoc on my system and the stress comes out in other ways but at least I feel confident that nobody else is affected by my fears. I am so tired and feeling very impatient.