Interruption of life
Two weeks ago, I received the call you never want to receive.
My dad: “Your mother is going into the hospital. The doctors are concerned about complications from her knee replacement surgery.”
After two hips and a knee, this knee replacement was supposed to be her last. About 6 weeks later, she was running a fever of 103, and was quite sick. The doctors were concerned about a possible embolism, or infection. So I flew out to the east coast (thank you, Jet Blue).
While I was winging my way eastward, the doctors did a thoracic MRI, looking for an embolism. Instead, they found really inflamed and swollen lymph nodes. They did a biopsy of the lymph nodes, and then gave antibiotics.
The fever finally cleared, my mom started to feel better, and the doctors released her from the hospital. The infectious disease doctors found nothing, so they declared the problem lymphoma, and made an appointment for my mother with the oncologist. The hard part was that we couldn’t find out pathology results. After a few days, they said that they were having a hard time in the lab, so they sent a sample to NIH.
Just this morning, my mother went back for a post-op follow-up with the surgeon who performed the biopsy. The surgeon said that indications now are leading to a conclusion of a benign problem, rather than a cancerous problem. The surgeon was surprised that we still didn’t have lab results, and immediately got on the phone to put peoples toes to the fire. While we’re still not sure, things are looking better and better.
Now that I’m back home, and have better news, I’m finally able to get back to working on my startup and my life in general