What just happened?

I feel like I've just been living in a dream and now I've woken up but its all still real..

I'm 23 years old, my Mum was 45. She had moved to Sweden with my Dad and brothers when I was 17, and I lived with my Nana. It never affected our relationship. In fact, I think it made it stronger! We never fought or argued after that, we were more like best friends. 

I remember when I knew I was going to lose my Mum. I woke up early one morning and had this overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. I rang my Mum and she said she didn't feel very well, and she was going to take a week off work and go to the doctors. My Mum never took time off work, ever. She hated going to the doctors and she hadn't been to hospital since my 15 year old brother was born. Even when my Uncle and Grandad died from cancer, she hurt but she carried on, because thats who she was. I knew something wasnt right. My boss came and asked what was wrong, and I remembering saying that I was going to lose my Mum. "Dont be dramatic, she's probably just tired and run down, you'll see." 

The doctor said the pain in her back was from a UTI, they said the pain in her shoulder needed investigating, but that she had probably just pulled it. She didn't tell them about the overwhelming tiredness she had felt, how teaching her mentor class was leaving her struggling to breath, how difficult getting out of bed and going for a shower had become. She didn't tell them the eye doctor had told her to go and get a brain scan before they could offer her glasses, because they didn't think her eyes were the problem. She didn't tell them about the moring she got out of bed and collapsed for no reason. She didn't tell them her Brother and Dad had died in the past 5 years. She didn't want to make a fuss.

She took a week off work, she rested. But it got worse, she called herself an ambulance because she thought she was having a heart attack. The paramedics thought she was having a panic attack, but then they asked her to sit up in her bed and she cried out in pain. They didn't know what was wrong but they felt that they couldn't leave this poor, thin frail woman on her own while her family were out working. They gave her some morphine and they took her to hospital number one, to a heart specialist ward. 

The diagnosed tachycardia and said she'd had it since birth. Easily fixed, just a daily pill to control her heart rate. But something still didn't sit right with the doctor. She would have had tachycardia since birth, why was she having an attack now? He saw how much she struggled to get herself a drink and he sent her for full scan from her waist to her neck, and then it all started falling apart. Fluid in her lungs? We need to drain that quick! Whats all these shadows on her lungs? Whats that big lump sticking out of her hip? Why is the pain in her back so crippling? Something isnt right..

My dad called me then. After he finished work. We hadnt spoken in 5 years, we clashed when I was 16. "Your mum is sick, she's in the hospital. Dont panic though she's not on her death bed! She'll be out by tomorrow." But she never left hospital.

They started her on a morphine that made her mind turn to mush. They needed to stop her hurting, they didn't know about how to stop cancer hurting. They just couldnt see her hurt this much. Her husband came and sat by her bedside till his teenage sons needed someone to be home with them. They adored their mum, they would sit with her every night and tell them about their day, they told her what was worrying them and she helped. She took them on adventures, and they got a hotdog out of it. Why wasnt their mum at home? Where had she gone?

I'd been waiting to fly out since she called me and said she was feeling unwell, but everyone thought I was being dramatic (which I am known for to be fair to them.) But I knew in my heart this was serious. Two days later the phone call came. "I need help, your brothers need help. You need to come and see your Mum." I left work and flew out the next day.

She was sick. She didn't really know who I was. She knew my name, but she didn't realise I was there. She thought she was hallucinating it, she though I was the morphine. It was hard to sit in that room that day. I didnt stay very long. I went to make my brothers tea and start talking about how sick our Mum really was, and start talking about death with them. They took it well, they knew this was serious too.

After her heart was under control, they moved her to a specialist ward in a bigger hospital for lung cancer patients. I remember walking on that ward and thinking "This is like God's waiting room." We met with a pain doctor, who saw how the morphine mum was taking was too strong for her, so he changed the type she was taking and told us she'd come back to us soon. She couldnt remember what happened 2 minutes ago, she couldnt remember what the doctors had said to her or what her nurses name was. She thought it was a prision, that the doctors were stopping her from moving with the tablets because they were going to steal her liver. She could hear the bidders talking behind the wall, putting in their price and waiting for the surgery. She was living in hell, physically and mentally.

I followed that doctor out the room and shit the door. I told him i lived in England, and that I had a flight back booked for the following Monday. I asked him if he thought that would be okay, and his blunt response was "No, don't fly back. Stay with her." And I wish I could tell that doctor just what he gave me in that once sentance. I didn't catch his name, but I will be forever grateful to him. 

The nurses knew my Mum was confused, and in Sweden visiting hours don't exsist. You want to get there at 7am and stay till 7pm? Great! You want to turn up at 1am because your loved one called you and is lonely? Perfect! Can we bring you a coffee? So it was with this mind set that a very kind and thoughtful nurse offered to bring a bed so we could be with her all the time. She trusted me, and "mostly" my Dad. At the end of that day, she looked round the room. "Where are the boys?" She asked my Dad. "At home, waiting for their tea my love." He told her. "Okay, so youre going to feed them and check on them." She turned to her friend who had come to visit. "Are you okay getting home? Will you be safe?" Always looking after everyone else. Such a selfless and storng woman, anyone who knew her would tell you. Then she turned to me. "And, did that nurse say you could stay here with me?" I nodded. "Yeah, if thats what you want Mumma." She smiled. "Yeah, that would be nice." And then that was that. The woman who never asked for anything had asked for one thing, to not be on her own. She couldn't move, her right leg had no feeling and kept "escaping" off the bed. She needed someone to hold her cup up for her so she could drink. She didnt trust the nurses, but she trusted me. 

2 weeks later, after many nights spent in that hospital next to her, we were called in for the worst meeting i've attended in my life. With my mum's bed dominating the room, my dad and two teenage brothers squashed in, I held my Mums hand as the true honest horror was delivered to us. It was stage four. It was terminal, there was no chance he would give treatment because she was just too weak for it. It was in her l2 vertibrate which was paralysing her slowly. She had 3 months left at best, but it didnt look good. (It later turned out that she had 15 tumours in her brain, 2 in her spine, one huge one in her kidney and it was in her bones and blood.) She didn't need to be in hospital anymore, but she needed so much care she couldn't really be at home either. So off we went, my 40yo Dad and my 22yo self to look at hospices for my dying mother. 

(If anyone is still actually reading at this point I would just like to say that I am skipping bits out here and there because i've already typed and huge story and theres more to come, so if things dont add up right i've just taken the wrong bit out. Sorry!)

The hospice was lovely, and a friend of my parents worked there too, so when I struggled with Swedish (which I did often, i'd gone to Sweden with no grasp of the language at all and had to pick it up as I went along) there was someone to help. I had the best time of my life in that hospice. I sat with my mum nearly every night. We drank hot chocolate and watched rubbish films and talked. Talked and talked and talked. We told each other everything about our lives, things you'd never normally tell your mum/daughter I imagine! But like I said, we were best friends. We laughed and laughed and we cried. I was there for her every need, but I didn't feel like i was caring for her. (There were nurses, she didnt like to bother them unless she had to though. Anything I could do, I did.) Nothing was left unsaid, nothing was a secret anymore and she prepared me for when the time came and she wasn't around anymore. What to say to my brothers, how she wanted to guide them into adulthood and what I should be saying to them when they had problems, what she would say. I'll never, ever forget her voice (but if I do, I recorded some conversations without her knowing, just to remind myself.) She wrote letters for us, on her phone, and had started hand writing them. I knew she had finished mine and my Dad's, and i sat with her while she started my brothers. But then the tiredness really started to get to her, and 20 minutes of writing exhausted her.

One night, my brothers had been away to see family and they were flying back. She told me to go home that night, to see them and ask them how their time was. I tucked her in the way she liked, I filled her water jug up. I gave her a big hug and kisses her forhead. She cuddled into her pillow and told me she loved me. I told her i'd be back in the morning and i'd stay that night. She said she'd like that and was looking forward to seeing me. I blew her a kiss and shut the door. I sat round the kitchen table with my brothers and talked about their trip, about our mum and we laughed and talked till late. It was nice, it was normal. It felt like everything was okay.

I woke up at 7am to my Dad calling me. He'd left for work but the hospice had called, we had to go now. I had to get the boys up and get there a.s.a.p because it was time. It was awful. I walkes up the halls i'd walked everyday for a month, the nurses smiling faced somber and some muttered their condolances. We'd had fun, the nurses had liked my mum, complimented her when i'd straightned her hair and she'd done her make up, soothed her as she cried when I wasnt there, they'd been amazing. And they looked devastated for us. And I walked into the day room, saw the tears in my Dad's eyes, and collapsed to the floor. It was like defeat. We knew it was coming, but we thought we had months left. 

A complication with her lungs had occured, which we were warned of but never thought could happen. Fluid had built up very quickly over night, and she very quickly and quietly passed away. My Dad made it in time to hold her hand and tell her she was beautiful. 

Thats the end. There was a funeral, which was beautiful. There are still things to do. I came home to England yesterday, but in the time I was away i'd given up my house and moved in with my boyfriend (as a financial decision, but not unexpected. Just not the way i imagined it would happen) so i'm re-adapting to life now, in a new home and a new area. My mum isnt here to call now and tell that I feel like im out of my depth. She not here to tell me its okay to feel scared, and that he's a good man that will look after me, so just relax and give it time. I know what she'd say, but its like a dagger to my heart, remembering all the pain and suffering she went through, and feeling the pain thats lodged into my heart from the very second I knew she was gone. I dont feel like I can carry on anymore. I cant sleep without nightmares and every second makes me want to go back to the hospice and watch rubbish films and drink hot chocolate. I'd give anything in the world, but the best thing in the world is already gone.