Confections For Cats

JOSEPH (Mathew's Twin) Out of work 5pm 2-23 MOM I’ll call in 5 minutes. He has a large mass in his                                                                                abdomen. They need to biopsy.   2-23-14 It’s pressing on all of his organs. Can’t tell where it started. 2-23-14 Being admitted to ZHills hospital, 

Saturday Afternoon, Feb 22, 2014 At the ER, we were immediately taken back to an exam room, and Mathew is prepared for a CT scan of his abdomen, specifically the liver. A doctor came in to ask more questions and went to touch Mathew’s abdomen and said, “Does it hurt here?” and pressed so hard on him, he screamed. I was horrified. I was sitting there when Mathew walked down the hall to use the restroom and give a urine sample. I recall watching him walk away in the hospital gown and wondering when his calves had become so pronounced. He had always been athletic, slender and muscular but the past year seemed to have been gaining some weight, and now I could see even his calves seemed larger. I waited there while they took Mathew for the scan. It would be the last time I let him go for any procedure by himself. Mathew returned from the scan and shortly after the ER doctor came in and looked at me with a bewildered look on her face and said, “We can’t even see his liver. There’s a

Saturday, Feb 22  I noticed Mathew was jaundiced (yellow), so I took him down to the walk-in clinic run by my doctor's office. Unfortunately, the Nurse Practitioner on duty didn't know either myself or Mathew, and we were met with the same treatment we had met from previous doctors.  "Do you use drugs?"  "Do you have homosexual sex?"  "How much do you drink?" And finally sending me out of the room in hopes that my son would confess to any number of addictions or activities to explain away his ill health. (Later, Mathew's Sarcoma Doctor would tell us how often this happens with sarcomas. A social worker called it 'The Story of Sarcoma'). We were told to come back on the scheduled appointment day to get bloodwork results. But as we were leaving the examining room, the nurse told the Nurse Practitioner that the bloodwork was in. I paused, hoping she would call us back into the examining room to give us the results. I could se

This starts with the day Mathew was admitted to the Zephyrhills, Florida Hospital. This was the day someone finally believed me and heard me when I said, "there's something wrong with my son." But being listened to this day didn't come easy. Mathew had been living in Tampa for a year after graduating from college. The week up to Feb 13th he and I had spent moving him back home. I felt that if he were closer to home, I could take better care of him and get him to a doctor that would take us seriously. We had been in and out of doctor's offices for months, trying to get someone to realize that there was something wrong. Friday morning, I took Mathew to see my doctor, a doctor Mathew has seen in the past, while in school. At this point, Mathew thought that his symptoms of;  -nausea  -vomiting - red urine was a withdrawal from the Horizant that the neurologist had prescribed and Mathew had stopped taking because it wasn't working and he could no longer a