My mother is in the Hospital (end of life, please read)
Yesterday, I came home with the girls after Kira's first soccer practice and my phone started ringing. My first thought was, how the hell is calling me at this hour? I look at the caller ID, which yes, I need to know who is calling me because I don't want to talk to some people - mainly bot calls.
Anyway, the caller was a nurse from the care home. She told me that she had just sent my mother to the ER because she had a seizure. My mother has no history of seizures so I panicked a bit. I gathered some stuff and rushed out to the ER.
When I go there, a nurse was doing an assessment of my mother while the blood lady was taking vials and bottles, for blood tests and cultures. The nurse told me that my mother's temp was over 103 - which was very different than what the nurse from the care home told me, (she said it was 99.6).
Either way, my mother was laid out completely straight on the bed. She wasn't responding to anything other than grunting when pinched, swapped, or poked.
I sat down in a chair by her bed a bit shocked by this. If everyone who knows my mother, she can be a pain in the ass and always wanting her coffee. Here she wasn't really moving and breathing really heavy.
Shortly after I arrived, the doctor came in and started to ask me all sorts of questions. One that stood out was, 'has your mother had a CAT scan of her recently here or at any other hospitals?'
After a few moments of answering questions, he asked me to follow him to another room to talk.
He brought me into another room with a computer with about four screens. The biggest screen had a scan of a top of a skull.
For the next five or ten or even twenty minutes, he started to explain and show me my mother's CAT scan from 2014. It was 'relatively normal' for my mother. For those who do not know, my mother has Hydrocephalus - water around the brain. She has had it since birth and didn't get a shunt until 2011. (I can explain more about her condition later but the main thing I want you to know is that since she was untreated for Hydrocephalus for almost 50 years, her brain is damaged. (They knew she has Hydrocephalus but it was the 60's and I'm guessing they didn't know the best way of handling things or whatnot.)
Anyway, because of this, her brain has been damaged and in some was 'soften' in a way. I know there are better terms but for right now, I'm keeping it simple.
The doctor is showing me these scans from 2014 and telling me about them. Then, he clicks on the scans he had done that evening. Right away, I notice something is off and it's hard to explain in words what without the pictures to show you but they were not the same as the ones from 2014.
In the scans from yesterday, there is a large mass almost in front of her brain. It measured about 8 cm around.
One problem is with a CAT scan, you really can't see things as well as an MRI can. He continues to tell me that he had reached out to a neurologist to get other opinions. I said yes, I would like that and he showed me back to my mother's ER bay.
I sat with her for a while. I stared at her for a while. So many thoughts and almost was going on in my head.
I couldn't really tell you how longs things were taking at the point. but almost everything you could think of popped in my head.
Eventually late that night, we spoke to a neurologist who told me that it was more than a doubt a tumor - most likely cancer. The issue was that without doing a biopsy, there is really no way of telling what kind of cancer it is. Also, she added that since it is 8 cm and there was no sign at all in 2014, this has grown fast. Brain tumors do not become this size in less than seven years. So she had no doubt that it will continue to grow rapidly.
Here came the hardest debate I have ever had with myself; do I rush off like a madwoman and get it biopsied and get her treatment or removed or anything at all? Throw everything and the kitchen sink at it?
Two things popped in my mind at this point,
one: she barely beat COVID when she had it last November.
two: because of how fragile her brain is, doing anything that involves breaking into the skull is very risky. The risks will always outweigh the benefits - if any.
To biopsy this mass - this tumor involves getting into her skull and cutting a section of it out and testing it. Even if we are able to get a sample, there is a high chance that my mother would die on the table. And how helpful would that be? We know what kind of cancer it is, but she's dead.
Second, even if we know what kind of cancer it is, the treatment course of possible surgeries, chemo, radiation, and a whole cocktail of meds for her to take, what quality of life would she have?
Even before she had COVID, I choose for her to be a DNR. Because I know that life-saving actions come with risks - like CPR could break ribs. And with all of her health issues, the risk of getting the life-saving actions would do more harm in the long run than any good.
A lot of people are aware of my mother's history with me and her family. She has always been difficult, stubborn, mean, rude, and other things. Even with all these horrible qualities, she is still human. She is still a child of God. She is still a living being. She is still my mother.
As a human being, as a living thing, she deserves quality of life versus quantity of life.
Even with treatment, what would that do? Add a few months, maybe even a year to her life. But at what cost? She would be sick, weak, tired, and worn out. Just because treatment added a year, what was the benefit if she is miserable?
Please do not take this as I didn't think about it. I have at many points in my life with her.
I have watched my grandfather, my grandmother, and my grandmother-in-law die. Working at the care home for a few years, I have seen people die. I have seen some drag-on and try to fight with every breathe while I have seen others go quickly without much, or any fight. Some went peacefully with family while some went peacefully alone. Some suffered until the bitter end.
I have been quiet for the past 24 hours because I honestly don't know what to do - if I can do anything. Should I try treatment? Should I do more to extend her life? Should I just do nothing?
I have cried, stared at walls, talked to myself out loud, talked to her doctors, and even just stared at her. What is the right call for this? What is the right decision for this?
She will be turning 60 in November. My father passed away at 62-ish. Jimmy Carter is still alive at 97. Who the hell am I to make this choice?
To be honest, I'm no one. But I am a daughter, a mother myself, a wife, a sister, a friend to like four people and I am human too.
Today, after spending hours of trying to track down records for my mother (seriously, what is wrong with state and losing paperwork? [trust me, that's another story].) It was ruled due to not knowing if her shunt is MRI compatible, it's not safe to do an MRI. So the doctors decided to do another CAT scan with contrast.
With this test, nothing new was really discovered other than she has some necrotic, dead material around the tumor.
After a lot of thinking, talking, texting, calling, crying, complaining, staring, and other things, I have chosen quality over quantity for the rest of my mother's time in this world.
Now maybe writing this long babble of a post might not be the best or proper way of telling people but for me, right now, I needed to get all of it out at once and in a way, share it with everyone.
Was this easy to type? Hell no. I have spent most of the day typing bits and pieces debating on what to do and what to share.
Tomorrow morning, I am going to meet with the health care team and start making plans about hospice and end-of-life care. I will also be reaching to lots of people in the upcoming days, weeks, maybe months.
But for now, I needed to type up a long-winded post and share what is going on in one place with everyone.
I am open for emails, calls, texts, messages, letters, and any other way you feel like getting a hold of me. But for now, I am trying to take things moment by moment and not dwell on her dying but on the time she is still here. Which is really hard and really scary.
That is really all I know at the moment. I will update as I go and I will post more about my mother and stuff as well. This was not what I had in mind for October.
If you want to send well wishes to my mother, I will post about how to do it and stuff like that later. Right now, it's almost ten o'clock at night and she is asleep peacefully. I'm going to leave it here.
