Mother's Dying :(

Wed, 24 Dec 2003 23:59:59 -800

Most of you who are close to me probably already know this, but I felt the need
at last to post something on my public web site. Why, I don't know for sure,
but it felt good to post something. Anyway, my mother has been fighting
breast cancer since August of 1999. Despite a brief remission in 2001, the
cancer recurred in 2002, and in mid-2003 we discovered that it had spread to
other parts of her body. Unfortunately, one of those parts happened to be
her liver. We tried chemotherapy, and for a while it worked...until her liver
started to fail. It seems that she had both the fast and slow moving varieties
of cancer, and the fast-growing kind took over in the liver. So that brings
us to today--she's too weak for anything like a liver transplant, so that
effectively rules out any treatment at all. With no liver (and no immune
system, either), she will not last very much longer.