Prayer Bleg

A request for help from any prayerful friends.

The SCMom (my Mom that is, not to be confused with my wife the SCQueen) is in the hospital and it's not looking good. She is in best care and the bills are covered. Prayers are about the only thing any one can do at this point. She is deeply religious and she will hear you.

[Warning: possible TMI ahead]

She's been fighting cancer for several years. Originally the OncDocs thought they'd gotten it all and in time. They said things like "We got it all and we don't expect a recurrence for at least 10 years and that's plenty of time to die of something else" (She was already in her late 60's).

The cancer was back in less than 2 years.

Since then it's been round after round after round of Chemo. Fortunately she never seemed to suffer most of the bad side effects of Chemo. Recently she's been sleeping most of the day and not eating much.

We saw them in June for their 50th wedding anniversary and again up at Lake Tahoe a few weeks ago. She looked ok in June but had a bloody nose the entire time at Tahoe and even spent a day in the hospital. One of her drugs had thinned her blood to the point that it would never clot.

She woke up a week ago having trouble breathing. SCDad called an ambulance. (I pictured AD & EpiJunky showing up at the door. I only hope this crew was half as good & thoughtful). The Dr's diagnosed pneumonia. They started her on a respirator and started antibiotics. Now in my experience with antibiotics (as a user), symptoms rapidly improve. That didn't happen. In fact for the last couple days the respirator has been doing all the breathing for her.

The SandCastle is several hundred miles distant, the SCSon is already back in school and fortunately I still have a job in this economy*. It's a bit frustrating we can't be there for them. We check in by phone at least twice a day. Yesterday SCDad was optimistic: "The lungs are still working as evidenced by the oxygen level in the blood." Today the optimism seems to have changed to acceptance: "No change and the doctors are now saying that in itself is a bad sign."

I'm afraid there is a call in my near future that starts off "I have bad news..."

* More accurately, I work for a CEO that sees value in his staff. He figures by keeping everyone on board, we'll get our new products to market as the economy recovers while our competitors that laid people off are late to the market. We Win. Instead, we made other sacrifices to keep the company profitable - unpaid furloughs, pay reductions etc.