TheBanyanTree: It never rains

[Sally Larwood]

I so sorry to hear about your mum Janice. My thoughts are with you. 

Sal 

Sent from my iPad 

On 11/09/2013, at 17:11, Janice Money <pmon3694 at bigpond.net.au> wrote:

> 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
> 
>