Hi everyone…
I know I’m not a very well known poster, but I’ve been around a while and read the SDMB pretty much every day. So I sort of feel like this place is a kind of home, and where I’m at right now I’m finding it a little cathartic (sp?) to write. And since I don’t have a LiveJournal, this place is it.
My mom, in her 60s now, had a reoccurance of her breast cancer that was first diagnosed about 16 months ago. She had in fact had two episodes of breast cancer, the first fifteen years ago and then again about seven.
Well, despite thinking she had beaten those, the cancer came back. It spread to her lymph nodes and her liver. Over the course of the last year plus, she’s been on several different chemo treatments, some of which worked well for a time (the lymph node problems were beaten back), but none did much more than a holding ground on her liver.
One chemo treatment stopped working this past November. She tried one experimental medicine, but it didn’t react well with her. So, shades of David Simmons, in early January she, my stepdad, and her doctors decided to stop treatment, enroll in hopsice, and let nature take it’s course.
Our family is very scattered - my mom and stepdad are out in LA, and my sibs and her sisters are scattered around the globe. Most everyone got out to see her in January. I just got out here a few days ago - because of the rush of visitors up till now.
When I got here five days ago, my mom was doing pretty ok - weak, tired, sleeping a lot, but still herself mentally. I got to spend some quality time with her, but I was not thinking that time was quite limited.
Yesterday morning her pain became quite bad, and the hospice people upped the medication for that. By yesterday evening she had become quite confused and by today she was even more out of it.
She was aware this morning, but by mid afternoon she was no longer coherent and now she is not even conscious.
Ah well, I’m doing what I do which is dwell on the details. The important thing is that she is dying, pretty fast at this point. The family is coming in from all ends of the earth as we speak, but I doubt she’ll even regain consciousness.
She’s been a great mom, sure we’ve had a rough spot or two, but she was always there for us and has done a great job keeping the family close. She’s a real people person - always concerned about others - even over the last few days as she was fading she was always reminding me to do stuff for my stepdad so that he didn’t push himself too hard.
She’s been on the opposite coast from me for the last fifteen years, but still we’ve been quite close, and I’d see her two or three times a year at least. It’s hard to imagine not having her be at least a phone call away, not to get any silly jokes forwarded to me from her via email.
And this coming less than three years after her mom, the real matriarch of the family, passed on… the two most important people in my upbringing will soon both be gone. I know the rest of the family will still be around, and that we’ll adjust to her not being there as we did with my grandmother, but she’s always been the glue that kept the family together. And I never felt I really had to grow up with her still around… well I guess it is time now, as I’m almost 40.
Well, time to cut this short, for whoever got through this, thank you for reading these rambling posts. It’s quite late here, I should try to get some sleep.
I guess the only sort of point I want to make at the end of all this – something we all should already know, but I know I for one needed a reminded – is don’t take for granted the time that you do have. Don’t put off the visits, make the most of the time you do have, and say what you want to say when you can. Even in my mom’s situation, when we had a clue the end was near, we never thought it would come this fast. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I hadn’t at least had these last few days.