TheBanyanTree: It never rains

[Janice Money]

On top of everything else, my mother is dying.  She had bowel cancer about 6
years ago.  Follow up showed no secondaries but there was one.  It finally
declared itself or rather, was detected, just before last Christmas when Mum
got carted off to hospital for investigation of weight loss and several
episodes of night wandering, the last of which involved her being found at
2.30am at Mt Ousley as she marched, handbag over her arm, up the F6 towards
Sydney while wearing odd shoes, her pyjama bottoms and a light jacket.

This all happened a week or so before we were supposed to take Mum with us
to Bermagui, where we'd spent our honeymoon, to help us celebrate our 30th
anniversary.  Doing that would also allow my sister some time off to go to
Perth for a wedding.  

We knew she had started wandering and were ready with plans to try and keep
her safe in strange surroundings.  My mother in law would be coming to share
a bedroom with her and be a familiar face in case Mum woke at night.  We
would take turns sleeping in shifts.  We would lock all exits and keep
strategic lights on at night.  I'd even bought some Blu Tack and 'Ladies'
signs to put on the bathroom doors.  But by the time we got to Wollongong it
was plain, for both medical and nursing home placement reasons, that she
would have to stay within the system.  Only weeks before Mum had been
talking about finding her swimming costume to bring with her on the holiday.
Now she couldn't remember where she was or what she'd had for breakfast.

The secondary is in the left lobe of Mum's liver.  The oncologist at the
hospital reckoned she had 4 to 6 months left.  I thought he was being too
pessimistic.  Everything works slower in old people.  My grandfather
survived 10 years after surgery for stomach cancer.  In young people that's
a very fast killer.  Six months will usually do it.

But it's beginning to look as if the oncologist's guess wasn't too far out.
The last time I visited her, in late July, I noticed that my mother's feet
were very swollen.  Often that's a sign of heart failure, but I didn't think
that was the likely cause since Mum has never had heart trouble.  I thought
that maybe the secondary had enlarged enough to cause some obstruction of
the inferior vena cava. The visiting GP had already started treating her for
heart failure and hypertension but a week ago I heard from my sister that
Mum's feet remain very swollen and he's changed the treatment - to what, I
don't know.  And today she wrote that Mum's skin and the whites of her eyes
are turning yellow.  Given where Mum's tumour is, if it's big enough to
cause obstruction to bile outflow it's definitely big enough to obstruct
venous return to the heart.

Tomorrow I see the radiation oncologist for a treatment planning session.
Once a date is set for my treatment to start I'll organise a date before
that to go back down and see my mother again.  It could be the last time I
get that chance.

Janice