I know yesterday I promised funny things about Fantasy Fest, but I can't really be funny today. Here's what happened last evening, about 9:30.

Neal and I are already in a pretty intense fight. There's yelling and crying. Then, he's squatted on the porch in front of me, trying to smooth things over. I'm licking my wounds and refusing to really communicate and trying to sort in my head which thoughts are feelings and which are facts.

Then the phone rings.

Neal greets my dad, and hands the cordless to me. I say hello and ask if he got a check I sent him. He says no, and I realize he's on his cell, which is a little weird.

"Jamie, your mom's in the hospital."

I suppose a little background is in order. My mom's been in and out of hospitals for about 8 years. She's fighting cancer. I didn't plan to get into this much detail here, but I'm just putting this out there and seeing if it makes me feel better.

Anyway, the cancer's attacked her over the years in 4 or 5 different places, including her brain. In fact, she was given a year to live the April before last. She's sick. She's not lie around sick, though. At least not usually. She still has hobbies and friends and a job. Just no hair, and my family has learned to never, ever get our hopes up too high, because we definitely aren't strangers to bad news.

So Dad's information isn't a complete shock, but it's still a surprise. I still have a little lump in my throat from reacting to Neal, and it gets a little bigger.

"What happened?"

She fell over the side of a staircase, and she knows she didn't trip, but she doesn't know why she fell. She shattered her right shin and knee.

My un-fucking-believably strong mother then proceeds to drag herself into the garage and use the car phone to call an ambulance.

They take her to the local hospital.

The idiot doctor tells her that when he looked at her x-ray, he could see cancer in her bone.

This is something new.

Bone cancer is one of the attacks this disease sometimes will stage that we haven't yet faced.

This is the part of the conversation when I begin to shake and cry. It wouldn't normally be. Normally, I'd wait till I got off the phone so I could hide it from my Dad, but I already have that lump there and there's nothing I can do to stop it.

Neal's already realizing that what I'm hearing on the phone is bigger than our argument. He moves from sitting near me with his hand on my knee to sitting beside me and wrapping his arms around me.

Dad then tells me they moved her from the small town hospital where they live to her familiar cancer center in Columbus. I have a serious love/hate relationship with this place.

The doctor there tells mom and dad that he isn't sure what the first doctor's talking about, because he can't tell whether there's cancer there or not.

So tomorrow, they will perform surgery to put in a plastic knee and fix her up. And they'll see if there's any cancer in her bone. And the rest of us will sit around and wait for really good or really bad news.

I'm tired and my throat hurts and my contacts are filthy, making everything look a little like a dream world. Well, that's appropriate.

Mom's friend from church just died from bone cancer last month. I can't tell you how hard my mom took it.

Her little body is still fighting the brain tumors.

These are old fears. This is nothing new. I've been dealing with this kind of news for almost half of my life. My youngest sister can't even remember my mom when she was healthy. I'm not even sure which ones to put down here, because there's too many to list. I've been collecting them since high school.

I suppose right now, the big one is I wish I wasn't across the country. I feel like the bad daughter.

I'll have news tomorrow, after the surgery.