Hey everyone,
my mum was diagnosed with SCLC 5 months ago and she unfortunately passed away over the weekend. Her cancer initially responded to the chemotherapy really well and she got through her treatment without any serious side effects. However, once she started immunotherapy her health started going downhill pretty quickly. Over the course of a month she started throwing up every day, picking up infection after infection and sleeping constantly. She got to a point where she was basically bed bound and would only wake up to either throw up or take her medication. It was heartbreaking to see her deteriorate so quickly after having such a successful start to her treatment. Going from having little family days out to her spending all day in bed was a difficult but mostly expected transition. It’s just that none of us expected we would hit that point as quickly as we did
She ended up being hospitalised after a really scary night that ended with an ambulance call. There we found out that the cancer was growing again and not responding to the immunotherapy at all. Her condition only continued deteriorating while hospitalised, and they eventually made the decision to stop her treatment and focus on keeping her comfortable. Her wishes were made very clear from the start and that was that she wanted to be home, so arrangements started being made. My sister and I rushed out of the hospital early that day to move furniture at home to make space for the hospital bed as she couldn’t be discharged until that was in place. While we were making those arrangements, we got the call to come back in immediately because she deteriorated even further.
We were asked to make a very difficult decision in the hospital that day. The doctors told us that moving her in the condition she was in could cause a lot of stress to her body and possibly prevent her from making it home. We had to decide whether to go against her wishes and keep her comfortable in hospital, or go with her wishes and run the risk of losing her before she made it home. We eventually decided to keep her there but knowing we went against her wishes is such a difficult thing to come to terms with. We couldn’t talk to her about it either because she was mostly unresponsive by that point. I just keep breaking because I feel like I let her down for not doing what she wanted. I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if she passed in transit but that’s more about my feelings and not hers. Everything just went downhill so quickly and so unexpectedly that none of us had any real time to think about things. I don’t really know how to deal with it all
Sorry for the long dump of text.
