- Ross's mom found out she hand lung cancer after fluid was found in her back during a routine check-up at the doctor's.
- In the time it took Ross to get to Australia, the cancer had spread from her lung to her liver.
- Ross originally thought that once he got there, he would know the game plan and course of action of how they'd move forward with chemotherapy and such: however, upon arrival after leaving LA for Australia the very next day after he uploaded the original video, he was told that test results would be delayed by a week, which sucked because Ross had only planned to be in Australia for that entire week.
- He was considering delaying or even outright cancelling TwitchCon, Scribble Showdown, and a Japan trip for work purposes entirely depending on the severity of the cancer.
- For that week, Ross and his family spent their lives trying to take Ross's mom's mind off of things for the entire week, went to an animal reserve, and Ross actually updated his Twitch stream with little updates of the reserve here and there, so the Twitch audience wasn't completely abandoned.
- All of Ross's family was eternally grateful for the support online, they were incredibly overwhelmed.
- The day before he was scheduled to leave, however, the test results had finally come back.
Now I'm gonna ditch the list format for a bit, because this next bit is important: Ross's mom has an incredibly rare gene (essentially like winning the lottery, according to the doctors) where once it's activated, it starts producing cancer cells in the lungs. So the good news is that, because of CRISPR, they could have such targeted chemotherapy that it could go right after that gene, and they could do it in
pill form, no radiation required; as Ross puts it, "it's still chemo, just extremely targeted chemo". This was also why the tests ran so long, because they needed to test for this very rare gene. So essentially, if she takes a pill once a day, every day, for 18 months, she will be cured, and should it become resistant there are 3 other pill variations that she could take. Had this happened 5-7 years ago, she would've been dead in 3 months.
In short:
Ross's mom is completely fine as of right now, and will hopefully be cured of her cancer over the course of the next two years.
- She tried veganism because they thought it might help her treatment, and she hated it so the minute she heard the news, she went and got a giant roast for their family to celebrate.
- To further celebrate, Ross moved forward with that trip to Japan...and then Ross drank heavily, and later streamed on Twitch some drunken karaoke.
- He visited a shrine in Japan and left a prayer for his mom, and also got invited to the Clip Studio Paint office.
- Ross is also still chill with Matt and Ryan.
Also a big thing: because of the people from Scribble Showdown/anime like Panty and Stocking, Ross got incredibly inspired to continue animation, albeit on a more limited scale (as he moved out of this pride phrase of feeling like he'd make something "lesser" than what he produced before if he did more limited animation).
His next animation is going to be an animation featuring the monster girls, and be a self-aware video called "How to Be Famous on the Internet", and has a few clips to show off. He then wraps up the video thanking everyone who donated and came to the streams, even when he wasn't actually streaming, and says he really appreciates the love and support he's gotten over that time.