Friday, February 10, 2012

It happened so fast


I have a lot of catching up and filling in to do. The last few weeks are the most fresh in my mind at the moment. So for now, I will start here & as I get to think more about it, work my way back.

Her cancer start out as cervical cancer, then it went to her lymph nodes in her groin and it went from there to her lungs, liver, adrenal glands, bones and finally her brain. the bones it went to were her shoulder & her femur, on opposite sides to each-other.she was also complaining of a sore foot in late november, so whether it was here too, chances are it was.

It gets bad when the pain starts which then became her way of life, her pain management was not as good as it should have been but this was her choice, not realizing or believing she was as advanced as she was, and thinking she had another 2 years or so to do this, she put up with more than she had to, more than i'd ever put up with & to her it made more sense to save the higher doses of pain relief for 'later'. But later was already here, she needed it now. She had a quantity of life, not quality really which does suck, if i had my way she'd have been on much stronger doses a long time ago. but it was her choice.

Towards the end, not only could she not do much but she was beginning to suffer with shocking headaches & I noticed her saying and texting a few odd things, nobody else really believed they thought it was the medication but i felt it was the cancer, just a gut feeling. the last few weeks would have been the worst i guess in that her pain levels went way up and her feet and lower legs swelled up and so did her tummy. before this, she was skinny. You can even see it in her face the fluid building up. her kidneys started to shut down it was the beginning of the end. that last week she went down hill at a frightening rapid rate. the week before she was unable to feed herself properly. kept half dropping the fork and her concentration was off. kept dropping off to sleep every few minutes, then she'd wake up again & pick up where she left off. She couldn't walk properly anymore, for a while it had been slow but she got to the point where she couldn't take more then a few steps to being out of breath to even stand up to get off the lounge, and into the wheelchair to get to the bathroom. It was scary to say the least.



it seemed to come out of nowhere, 'the end'. bang it was there & then over that last week day by day she just got worse & one thing started to slow down to stopping..like her voice, it had gotten quieter in the last 2 weeks..went down to hardly being able to talk at all to then the last 2 to 3 days, not fully communicating properly to being in a coma for the last day and a half.. just so very rapid . We watched the life draining from her day by day, like a toy running out of batteries, so did her life.

It's a shock but the only positive thing was she was not in pain by this stage as her medication (morphine) was upped, a morphine pump was put in and she was in the hospital bed in her lounge room with a catheter. After this was done, we knew she'd not ever get out of that bed. I think this was on the Friday. it was horrid but there was no other way out of this.
it was peaceful that she was not in pain anymore, we'd not seen this level of 'comfort' i guess you could call it since around June the year before just gone.

I don't know, i guess i know i just accepted that this was going to be the way it is. When it was coming closer to the time that she did go. i was glad i think we all were, she did go on that sunday morning, watching another whole day after a whole day and night before was pure torture & seemed too hard and extremely daunting but you knew once she had gone, that this was it. Watching her breathing slow down to big long deep breaths, watching that struggle of her life ending, well was the hardest thing any of us has ever had to see and do. We didnt do it, she did. We just stayed with her, till the end.. she did what she had to do & everyone of us that were there to support her until the end, just did it. there was no place on this earth any of us would have rathered have been.

Our world was in that unit, in the loungeroom. there was no world outside the walls.

With every small corner turned, every hour gone , we knew there'd be no going back, that this was going to be it... & I knew as much as I wanted her suffering to end when it did finally happen I'd want her back. we all did. nobody on this planet wanted her to go.

At 8:40am, her breathing changed for the last time. she started to get that rattle in her last 10 minutes and then she was gone, just like that...my little sister passed away at 8:50am.. :( xxxxxxxxx


What the hell just happened, I didn't know. I still don't entirely know. One day I might realize the enormity of all of this, it's only been 25 days .

2 comments:

Pitstop said...

Bless you bless you bless you. xxxxx
No one knows why.I watched my mum die of cancer.It went to mum's brain too. Dad said it was the medication and I just knew it wasn't.It was quite sudden at the end. I was the only one there. There were others in the hospice, but not in the room.The nurse fetched them in time. But it made things not peaceful. It was the frantic minute before she passed. My heart goes out to you. My mum wan't young, and she lived for a year after diagnosis. Take care xx

Ruth said...

Time lots of time. Then some moment or thought or picture will bring her sharply to mind again. Hugs to you. I hope little sister found her peace.
Ruth