Antarctica Starts Here.

Yinz might want to block the tag "cancer" in my posts henceforth. I'll figure out later how to get Switchboard to add hashtags to my posts.

I really can't think of any other titles for these posts, so to hell with it. It's descriptive and the best I can come up with. And I'm probably going to ramble. Sorry.

Mom didn't have a very good night last night - between the pain in her abdomen creeping up to 6/10 again and her O2 dropping, when I came in this afternoon she wasn't looking very good. In addition to supplemental oxygen through a nasal cannula the doctors slipped what looks like a very skinny catheter down into her stomach to inject some sort of radiopaque liquid because they want to do an x-ray some time today to get a better look at what's going on. The liquid in question also appears to be something of an irritant, so they're hoping that it'll get things moving again. Her intestines aren't completely blocked, "just" blocked enough to be a huge problem. As mentioned earlier, cancer robs you of your dignity in addition to everything else, and this certainly qualifies.

Additionally, her abdomen is quite distended; hopefully it's everything stuck in her intestines and not another manifestation of the cancer. The pain appears to be localized to the left side of her abdomen. Again, hopefully it's where the obstruction is and not another tumor rising up like a horror from the depths of the Internet. There is also a possibility that fluid is once again accumulating in her abdomen (likely, given the MO of ovarian cancer) or lungs.

I guess one could readily call cancer Because Fuck You, That's Why.

Folks might be wondering why I'm writing blog posts rather than posting all the details to various social networks. The reason is, first, I want to. Switchboard does all the crossposting for me. Second, when talking to my mom yesterday, she said that she wanted a record of some kind of what she's been going through Out There, and (jokes aside) the Net is as Out There as I can get without going all SETI.

More later.