Updating in the next few days

Life has not been very kind to my family of late. I've had a mother-in-law put into a nursing home on my birthday, and at the same time I heard that I had an aunt dying of cancer she beat 11-1/2 years ago, my mother and her siblings left for CA to be with their dying brother whose terminal cancer turns out to be a result of an autoimmune familial illness that begins with Celiac Disease, which is a nutritional and autoimmune response to the ingestion of gluten, which is present in most foods and some medications. It can cause tumors which lead to the type cancer my uncle died from while my mother was there.

It turns out that this autoimmune disease runs in families and his younger brother has it, as well as one of his daughters. His mother, my maternal grandmother, had rheumatoid arthritis, as does my mother, which is also an autoimmune disease, but it's even more closely associated to what I have, which is systemic lupus erythematosis. It happened that a week after my uncle's death, my mother and I went yesterday to see our rheumatologist 45 miles from here. She told him of her brother's death, and he became very concerned about all the immunologically-damaged family members on that side of the family. CE is strongly associated with a group of genes on Chromosome 6, so my mother and I are being tested for any signs of this disease. They took 9 vials of blood yesterday from me yesterday, and 7 from my mother, and we were both checked for tumors. I exhibit many more of the symptoms than my mother, but he could feel no tumors. Should the blood tests show anything, I'm sure we'll be checked by more revealing tests for tumors than just the doctor's touch.

My heart just hasn't been into the computer, blogging, or anything else, for that matter. It has been the week from hell. I just hope my aunt's kids get home in time to see her alive. They're all coming Dec. 3, but I don't think she'll see another Christmas.