My heart is breaking, and this past week has been the worst in my life. My 82-year-old mom has an eight-and-a-half-year history of COPD and osteoporosis, brought on by the steroids she has been taking to help her breathe. The osteoporosis causes compression fractures in her spine, which are very painful. Anyway, on Friday (12/19) my mom's shoulder was excruciatingly painful, and on Friday night she was very nauseated. She had also made an appointment for Monday with her general practitioner, because she'd developed a swelling around her left collarbone. I figured she had a fractured clavicle that was causing her pain, and that the pain meds were making her sick. But things deteriorated over the course of the weekend, and we called her GP on Sunday to see what he thought. He actually made a house call (we're so lucky to have him!), and he was concerned about the swelling, especially when he noticed it was right above her mastectomy scar from 20 years ago. He wanted to get CT scans of the area as quickly as possible on Monday.
By Monday morning, she was so weak and a bit disoriented, so we took her to the ER at the doctor's advice. He admitted her to the hospital right away. She was still pretty confused for most of Monday, but by the afternoon when she went to radiology, she was almost completely lucid again.
The news from the CT scans was devastating: the swelling was a mass that appeared to have already metastasized to the bone, and she had another mass on her liver. The doctor told my dad and me privately that he didn't think she had the strength to fight it, especially since it was in the liver already. He didn't tell her about the liver right away, just the mass on her chest wall, because he didn't want to overwhelm her. She was so courageous, saying she would have chemotherapy and beat this. She said she wanted to spend some quality time with me doing things we loved together, and she and I would get to have at least one more good mother-daughter talk so we could say everything we felt we needed to, in whatever time she had left. We all figured we could tell her the full story and discuss the details on Tuesday. We were wrong.
By Tuesday morning, my darling mother was delusional. She recognized everyone she knew, but she also hallucinated about things that weren't there and would start randomly asking us about thoughts in her head, assuming we already knew what she was thinking. She was somewhat lucid for about 15 to 30 minutes, but after that it just got worse. She started getting anxious, trying to get out of bed and pull the sheets off because she thought they were dirty, so they gave her an anti-anxiety medication push in her IV and restrained her gently with a vest that could be attached to the bed rails. When we asked her doctor how long she had to live -- days, weeks, or months -- he said "weeks" was about right. He also told us that he would write an order for in-home hospice care, and we met with the social worker to arrange for her to stay in the hospital hospice ward until after Christmas, since we couldn't get a room at home cleaned out fast enough to fit the equipment and bring her home before Friday.
By yesterday, she was only semi-conscious and extremely agitated. The doctor told us that her biopsy showed that her breast cancer had returned, and this meant it had probably spread to her brain already, thus the rapid-onset dementia. He said she now had only days to live. My mom was born and raised in The Netherlands, and on Wednesday the few words she spoke in her sleep were all in Dutch, even though all her conversations with everyone on Tuesday had been in English. When the time came to give her a bath and change her bed linens, the process of moving her was so painful that she screamed at the nurses in Dutch the whole time, only she thought it was my dad and her parents who were hurting her. It was agonizing to see her suffer so much, and we realized that the trip home for hospice care would be miserable for her, so we decided to keep her in the hospital's hospice ward after all. She had asked us on Monday not to let her die in a hospital, but by now she was so out of it she didn't know where she was, and moving her caused her such pain, and she only had days left.
As I expected, today, Christmas, was rough, made more so by the doctor's call around 11:00 a.m. that he did not expect her to survive the day. My dad and I went to see her three times, and she's in a medically induced coma now, as I understand it. We were so grateful that today she has been peaceful, though her breathing is very labored. We were also happy that we could hold her hands today, because yesterday, before they started her on morphine, she was so agitated in her semi-conscious state that every time anyone tried to touch her, she would push their hands away. She also couldn't stand the feeling of sheets or her gown yesterday, and kept pulling them off; but today she slept quietly. Her hands were so warm and soft, and her color was so good. I kept expecting her to wake up and say "hi kid!" She always said that to me while she'd squeeze my hand. It's still so hard to wrap my head around the fact that on Monday night I was having a normal conversation with her while she waited to go to radiology, and tonight she could be gone.
My dad and I are both dreading the idea that the final call might come during the middle of the night; but on Tuesday, in one of her semi-lucid moments, she asked us to promise her that she would die at night, so we wouldn't have to be there to watch it happen. Like we have any control over that. But whenever it happens, we are so glad she'll finally be at peace. Tonight we told her that her work here is over, and we will miss her so much, but we'll get along without her. I hope she heard us and can let go of the body that has caused her so much suffering over the past eight years, but especially the past nine months.
My dad has no regrets. They've known each other for 61 years, and they've been married for nearly 55. He will just miss her so much. I, on the other hand, thought on Monday that I still had some time to just talk with her and tell or ask her so much. Then she pretty much slipped away from me overnight.
Please everyone, on this Christmas day, my only gift I can give you is to remind you to love and enjoy your families every single minute you can. Tell them the things you need them to know, because life happens quickly.
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