My emotionally abusive mother recently (5-6 weeks) found out about her Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). Apparently she's been having problems over the last 15-16 months, which my dad knows about, but they both kept us in the dark about it so we wouldn't be worried. It was at first misdiagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis, which we also did not know about.

In the last nine months, my mother has lost over one hundred pounds, has started getting huge bruises that take up half her face and are gone within twelve hours, and has fainted twice but both times was back up in under a minute. She told us that the behavior that she said might've been mean (total understatement), was because she had 3 inches of pus in her skull. I'm not entirely sure what pus in her skull has to do with CLL, as she explained it to us as a disease in which the red blood (the ones that fight off infection, she said, though she was wrong, because it's the white blood cells that do that) are overwhelmed by the amount of white blood.

What I need to know is if pus in the brain is actually a symptom of CLL, if that pus can cause changes in personality, and what a 'poor' prognosis means in terms of CLL. At this point, I'd be especially appreciative to any advice or an actual explanation to what CLL really is.

Honestly, I don't believe her CLL has anything to do with her behavior which has been going on for over fifteen years, but I'm starting to worry that she's actually sincere in her apologies, and that she's actually thinking and feeling like a normal mother rather than my mother. It would make protecting myself from her advances very painful, as I know that even if that were the case, I'd never be able to forgive her in the slightest for anything she's done.