I try to just post about my life on here. I don’t think it’s appropriate to tell other people’s news.
But…
Bit of a biggie.
Mother has died.
It’s a bit of a shock. She came over from Bulgaria to visit for a few weeks over Xmas. She arrived in December, hale and hearty. She went out for the day with Lisa in fine fettle. She got her covid and ‘flu jabs, then the next day felt rotten. She ignored it, thinking it was the jabs knocking her sick. When it didn’t get better, and she couldn’t eat, Lisa took her into A&E on New Year’s Day. She never came out of hospital.
At first they diagnosed it was a perforated bowel with an ulcer on it that was giving her stomach pains and making her unable to eat. Then they realised she had a mass on one of her kidneys. After a while they confirmed it was cancer. At every stage it looked like she was going to get better. You have two kidneys, whip one out, if the cancer hasn’t spread, you’re good to go. They kept moving her from Warrington hospital for treatment, to Halton hospital for physio so she could be discharged, after which they could do the operation. Then she’d take sick so they’d move her back to Warrington. Each time she was sicker and weaker. Then she got fluid on her lungs. I still thought she was going to get better. But she couldn’t eat, she was sipping a tiny bit of water every day and she was refusing or throwing up her meds.
Finally, a few days ago, I asked the nurse. I said she’d been here for weeks and she wasn’t getting any better, how long until she got better? The nurse gave me a look. Is she not going to get better? No.
That was a gut punch. Especially for Lisa.
The next day mum was sitting up in bed, she drank two glasses of water, and the doctor came around with a full plan for her recovery. Feed her through a tube in her nose, meds and fluid through the drip, get her strong enough to discharge then put her in for the kidney removal operation.
I was amazed and relieved. Lisa was ecstatic. It seemed miraculous.
The next day Lisa called me, the doctors had said mother was in such a state (cancer on the kidney, lung filling with fluid, heart disease) that if she didn’t improve they were going to start her on end of life meds, and to get the family in to say goodbye.
They knocked her out with painkillers then started her on a syringe driver. She never woke up. It took her slightly less than 24 hours after the driver being fitted to her to stop breathing. Lisa stayed with her the whole time, holding her hand. I was there when she went. Lisa said she’d stopped breathing. I took her pulse and that was that. She was gone. No drama, no death rattle, just peacefully stopped.
Awful as the whole thing was, it was the best end for mother. The alternative would have been her getting sick in Bulgaria, being whisked into a hospital alone (they don’t allow visitors, apparently), where they all speak a language she didn’t understand, confused and scared and dying alone. It would have been a nightmare.
This way she was in the UK, with English speakers, and though she suffered, and got moved in the night twice which left her panicked when she woke up, she had Lisa with her every day, and her family around her, and English speakers to explain everything to her. And at the end she died peacefully in her sleep.
My dad stayed in Bulgaria.
Now we are sorting out a cremation, then Lisa is going to fly her ashes back to father.
It hasn’t destroyed me like it has Lisa, (for which I’m thanking the BPD) but it is sad and horrible.
You just never know. Two months ago she traveled to the UK by herself. A few weeks later she could barely stand, then couldn’t even get out of bed to go to the toilet, and now dead.
Poor mum. In the grand scheme of things it was relatively quick and she didn’t suffer that much, and what I said above, Lisa, English, peaceful, but still, it was a horrible, pitiful thing to see.