It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
HENRY FIELDING, Amelia
Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/d/death_quotes.html#tvxMZViDIEKdBK3F.99
It hath been often said that it is not death,
but dying, which is terrible. -- Henry Fielding, Amelia
It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
HENRY FIELDING, Amelia
Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/d/death_quotes.html#tvxMZViDIEKdBK3F.99
It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying, which is terrible.
HENRY FIELDING, Amelia
Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/d/death_quotes.html#tvxMZViDIEKdBK3F.99
Today I am going to pull back the curtain on a nightmare.
One showing only.
I'm doing this for a few reasons.
First, there are a lot of things doctors won't or don't tell you about what to expect after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. There is plenty of information on what to expect physically after a cancer diagnosis.
Mentally, not so much.
Second, writing about these things helps me deal with them. This particular issue has been slowly eating away at me for the last several months.
However, it was earlier during a routine scan in September to check up on her bowel obstruction, they first detected a lesion on one of her lungs.
We lost mom the day she received that news.
Not physically. Up until her final days, she still looked pretty much the same. Gaunt from being fed intravenously for the previous 18 months because of the chronic blockage of her bowels, but otherwise no huge changes in her appearance.
No, we didn't lose her physically.
We lost her mentally.
And, looking back at the last four months of her life, that was one of the hardest things about her diagnosis we -- and she -- had to deal with.
I think deep down mom knew something was wrong with her -- on top of the lupus, the bowel problems, the fibro and the Reynaud's -- and it deeply impacted her mental health.
After finding out she had a lesion on her lung, the change in her personality was rapid.
We began noticing she was having trouble finishing her sentences.
She would repeat herself.
She cried in my arms one day because she couldn't remember her grandmother's name.
Matters came to a head in October when my brother Christopher called me from her house. He was there to take her to a doctor's appointment.
My brother, who never seems to be bothered by anything, called me.
"I think something's wrong with mom. I can't get her out the door for her appointment," he said.
"What are you talking about?" I responded testily since his monotone delivery didn't seem to match what he was trying to tell me.
"I mean, she's sitting on the floor and she's not speaking," he said.
"But I was just there yesterday," I protested. "She was fine."
"Well, something's wrong," he replied.
"I'll be right over," I said, running for the car. I was there in less than five minutes.
Chris was bent over mom who was sitting on the floor of the hallway near the front door. I knelt down to get to her level.
"Mom? What's wrong?"
She looked at me and looked so confused. She tried to talk a couple of times but nothing came out.
"Mom? Do you know who I am?" I asked as the panic rose in my throat.
She looked terrified.
"Call 911," I told Chris. I was afraid she was having a stroke.
"Okay mom, I'm going to help you back to the couch. We're calling an ambulance," I said as I helped her off the floor.
While we waited for the paramedics, she spoke a few words which made little sense.
The paramedics arrived and took her vital signs which were normal. She was not able to communicate with them so they rushed her up to the hospital.
We followed and by the time we saw her about 30 minutes later her condition was slightly improved, but only slightly.
All she would say, over and over, was "I'm fine."
We told the attending physician about the lesion on her lung -- which, at that time, had not been officially diagnosed as cancer -- and he suspected a couple of possibilities.One, was a stroke. The other was brain cancer.
They did an MRI on mom's head and, as we joked with her later, found nothing.
We then found out that it is common for recently diagnosed cancer patients to experience depression, anxiety or both.
And that's when I realized what I saw in mom's eyes when she sat on the floor -- I saw myself.
She was experiencing all the symptoms I had experienced when I was at my most ill -- the inability to focus, finish sentences and, sometimes, even speak.
Mom was experiencing extreme anxiety in the face of a possible cancer diagnosis.
When she eventually got the official diagnosis, her mental health worsened. For a long time she couldn't even say the word cancer.
Eventually she was able to and this is the "conversation" I would have with her several times each visit.
"I have cancer."
"Yes mom."
"It's not curable but it's treatable."
"Yes mom."
"I'm going to fight this tooth and nail."
"I know mom, I know."
Fifteen minutes later we would say the same things again as she had already forgotten talking about it with me.
Even though dad would lay out her medication on the counter with instructions on exactly when to take them, I would arrive in the afternoon to find she hadn't taken any of them.
Mom began obsessing over things like her medical appointments, clutching the calendar in her hands and staring at it blankly.
There were times her anxiety was so bad she asked me to leave.
"I hope you're not angry," she would say with tears in her eyes.
Knowing all too well how overwhelming the simplest of things can be when you're in the midst of an anxiety attack, I told her I understood.
Mom also began exhibiting another symptom of depression and anxiety, irrational fear.
In a tiny voice, trying to speak through her tears, she would tell me she was so scared. When I asked her about what, she would say, "Of losing my house."
In mom's depression- and anxiety-wracked brain, her thought patterns were completely irrational. She was afraid the insurance company would cut off her long-term disability payments (she was already on LTD for her lupus) and she would not be able to make payments and the bank would foreclose.
She would also tell me she was afraid she wouldn't live to see Christmas.
I tried to help her by doing an exercise I learned in therapy -- it's called cognitive behaviour therapy or CBT for short. Basically, you write down your irrational thoughts and then counter them with more realistic, rational ones.
For example, I would get mom to write down "they're going to cut off my disability because of my cancer diagnosis" with the more realistic "they're less likely to cut my disability because I have another disability on top of my previous one."
And, as for the dying before Christmas, we wrote "no doctor has given me a prognosis of less than 30 days to live."
And so on.
Initially it seemed to give mom some comfort. When I would come to visit, she would be holding on to that piece of paper, repeating the rational responses over and over like a mantra. The paper was shiny from being handled so much.
Eventually, however, even that bit of therapy didn't help.
Mom sunk deeper into depression and anxiety.
She would talk about getting "stuck" in negative thoughts and couldn't get out of them. She would sit for hours at a time doing nothing but experiencing those negative thoughts over and over like a broken record in her mind.
And I wept with frustration at the bitter irony that the woman who stood by me and held me when I went through the worst of my depressions was suffering the same thing.
And there was nothing I could do to make it better.
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