Day Two - Evening

No matter where one ends up geographically, if your roots are embedded in New York, THAT is where you are from. After we returned home from an afternoon of surrealism, I spoke with my aunt and simply said, "It's not good." She simply said, "Hang up. I'll call you back." And with that the FAMILY took over.

When you have a cousin who's husband is Professor, Vice Chairman and Director of Rhinology in the Department of Otolaryngology at New York University Medical Center, and who's daughter just finished her fellowship in Radiology and starts a job at Lenox Hill Radiologists within two weeks, you get out of the way and let the wheels of family take over. My aunt called back within the hour and said,

Call her doctor right and get all of her films and reports for as far back as they will give you. If you can get them tonight you have an appointment tomorrow with Dr. Julie Mitnick at Murray Hill Radiology. If you can't get them tonight the soonest appointment we could get was on Tuesday. Call me back when you know.

That was that. I hung up, called the imaging place and was told it would take them 24 hours to gather everything. I couldn't get them to move any faster because I wanted that day's ultrasound and their records office was already closed for the day--it was 3:55 PM....typical. So I said I would pick everything up the next afternoon, called my aunt back and told her to confirm the appointment for Tuesday---and she did.

That night was fairly uneventful. No one had actually used the "C" word to my mother so she was in huge denial of the seriousness of the situation. I chose to allow her that little bit of sanity for the rest of the night.

When I got home, I went out for my daily 2.5 mile run as I learned one very important lesson back in 1991 during Mom's first surgery and again in 1998 when Dad began to decline: take care of myself or I'm useless to her. Halfway through the run I "lost it." I kept running, but I'm sure I was quite a sight.