Monday's update: part 2

Courage is grace under pressure. - Ernest Hemingway

Yesterday I read a story about new research showing definitive proof that a parent's love is key to brain development in children.

After taking into account a whole range of factors that can affect hippocampal size, the researchers found that children with especially nurturing, caring mothers, based on their behavior during the laboratory stressor, had significantly larger hippocampi (plural of hippocampus - you’ve got one on each side of the brain) than kids with mothers who were average or poor nurturers.

If I had paid attention in my high school biology class, I would have learned that the hippocampus is responsible for a person's ability to handle stressors and to store personal memories. Small hippocampi makes one less likely to show grace under pressure, and sadly, that pressure can even shrink one's hippocampi.

In addition to protecting us against brain illnesses, we all need big hippocampi because this brain area, while not much bigger than your little finger, plays a disproportionately large role in how you will be able to handle the stresses and strains of your life, and how you will remember your life when it’s all said and done. This is so because the hippocampus is crucial for our ability to form and store personal memories. It is also of central importance for restraining the body’s stress and inflammatory responses, both of which can induce significant damage to bodily organs and the brain if not properly reined in.

Children who grow up to have small, underperforming hippocampi are less able to handle stress; that stress in turn shrinks their hippocampi - leaving them even more at risk for illnesses and depression.

Parents only have their children in their immediate care for around 18 years, but their love sets them up for success for a lifetime.

Two sets of loving parents, Ken and Judy
and Sara and Charles (with son, Macklin). Christmas 2011.

Luck and love

These days we spend a lot of time thinking about how lucky we are to have been raised by such good parents. You couldn't ask for a more loving mom or dad. Mom's new adventure with brain cancer is about the biggest stressor we can imagine, and it's one that we never anticipated. We can handle it, though, and carry Mom through the rough times thanks to our loving family, supportive friends, and our big, healthy hippocampi.

Coda to the radiation story

Edwards Cancer Center is the hospital facility that provides the radiation therapy, and we had a good experience with them until now. The staff have been kind, and the lobby is light-filled, cozy and offers a family lounge with puzzles. Patients and families work on a puzzle while waiting, but appointments last just 15-20 minutes, so we only get a few pieces placed at one sitting. When we return the next day, the puzzle has more pieces complete than when we left it, and the picture slowly comes into focus through the collaborative efforts of strangers. It's both a solitary and communal activity to pass the time.

Usually we look forward to radiation, but the last several days have just been one aggravation after another. Mom's appointment was canceled last Friday so they could perform a software upgrade. Apparently software upgrading is an activity they are unable or unwilling to do on a weekend when they are usually closed, so patients needing this critical therapy were told to simply wait.

And wait we did, more or less patiently, until Monday. As Mom's appointment time approached, she was told that there would be a slight delay - the radiation machine had "gone down." (Did they try rebooting it? Sorry, that's an old IT joke...) The nurse told us Mom would be wheeled to radiation later in the afternoon.

So the time passed. And passed. And then it was dinnertime, which came and went without any word from the folks at Edwards Cancer Center. Our patient nurses were losing their patience, and calls to the Center went unanswered.

At 6:15 pm, we realized that waiting patiently was perhaps the polite thing to do, but it was achieving exactly nothing. I suggested calling Mom's oncologist, and Dad agreed but suggested that we (Jennifer and I) go down to the Center and see how much longer we would have to wait for radiation.

When Jennifer and I arrived, the Center was open and brightly lit - but there was no one to be seen. The front desk was abandoned, with the phone unmanned and CDs of patient records sitting on the desk for anyone to take. We waited, knocked on the doors, spoke loudly, and still no one came. I called the Patient Services Representative line, which forwarded me to an answering service where I left a message for the radiation oncologist-on-call.

Where are your people, and why have they left a patient with glioblastoma multiforme waiting?

Meanwhile, Jennifer slid past the "Patients and Staff Only" sign and went in search of some answers. She found a technologist, and we asked her how much longer we would have to wait.

Oh, the machine was down for over an hour this afternoon, and we got behind. We can't catch up with everybody. We'll have to start again tomorrow.

You can imagine our response. We asked whether they prioritized the waiting patients to put the most critical ones first? (No.) Couldn't they just fit in one more patient? (No. It was past closing time already, and the front desk staff had left for the day.)

That was the moment our hippocampi kicked into overdrive. To make a long story a little shorter, let's just say that one of us cried, the other one got really mad, the radiation oncologist on call was consulted, and they decided they could, in fact, manage just one more patient.

So Mom got her radiation therapy around 6:45 pm on Monday, and we're back on track for the remaining two weeks.

And that, my friends, is the kind of perseverance taught to us by our Mom.