"Cut This Bitch Out."

As I mentioned before, sometimes I don't answer the phone when my mom calls.

This morning, I was running down Prospect Street, burning off last night's pizza and beer, and blasting The Replacements. I hit "reject" (oh, that sounds so harsh), out of breath and wheezy, running on shoes that should have been replaced last summer, essentially punishing my body for punishing my body. It's a good kind of pain.

Are you there, Shin Splints? It's me, Dottie.

The odds of me ignoring a phone call are low these days, and as I rounded my last corner to my house, I started overthinking her call. She's seeing her surgeon today. What time was the appointment? Christ, can't you remember any times of any appointments? But today was her team's liver conference. Did she get a call about that in advance?

Then I started overthinking her odds of resection. Did they find something different? Is surgery going to be off the table? How hard will it be for her to recover?

It's amazing how wound up a person can make themselves in a matter of seconds.

Throughout the past week, I've been pushing positivity. I haven't tried to discount my mother's anxiety, but I thought if I puked rainbows and glitter that I could be optimistic enough for the both of us. Until I started choking on the rainbows, and everyone knows that glitter is toxic over a long-enough time.

I checked my voicemail.

"Call me when you can, I need your social security number for an insurance policy thing."

Oh, for pete's sake. 

I quickly dialed back, sending my love as she headed to her surgeon's appointment.

Pre-embo, earlier this year. One of us is high. The other is on Norco.

What we wanted to hear was that resection is a viable option, that her team is going to open her the fuck up and discover what's been going on. The ulcers from errant radioactive seeds may be removed along with the section of liver (her left lobe, if you're a bio-nerd and are keeping track), so after her post-op pain subsides, she would most likely have a more significant quality of life.

And that's exactly what we heard.

Crack those ribs! Crack those ribs!

Aside from the normal disclaimers ("I may open you up and close you back up, I'm not sure I can get it all, we need a vascular surgeon on call, this surgery has a 2% mortality rate, I'm a big wuss"), we got a Big Fat Surgery Date.

On Tuesday, May 12 (ten days before her birthday), my mother will go in for a hemihepatectomy (normspeak: she'll have half her liver, the part with the tumor, removed).

BRING ON THE CHAMPAGNE.