I Lost a Parent to Cancer
March 2, 2011, I lost the most amazing woman I have ever had to the pleasure to have in my life. My fiances mother, who took me in as her own daughter and was there for me when I needed someone the most. She was a mother to me. She was diagnosed with cancer January 2011. She had been sick before that for a couple months but her doctors and the hospital just wrote it off to brochitus and pneumonia. It wasn't until she was transfer to a Johns Hopkins affiliated hospital that we found out what was really going on. Our local hospital had even seen spots on her lungs in her MRI that they again wrote off to Pneumonia, and never told us about. She was in the hospital for almost 2 months and her lungs got so bad that she had to be put on 100% oxygen and was heavily sedated because of the tube down her throat. This was after she had a port put into her chest for chemotherapy and other itravenous procedures because her veins were blown from being stuck so many times; and a first round of radiation. It was too much for her body to handle. That was the first time they told us she wasn't going to make it. We were devastated. The whole family was told to come to the hospital. She was under for almost a week. I have never been through anything worse than having to see her like that. But then she started getting better...Her lungs were starting to heal and she was able to come home after going down from ICU to the cancer wing. She couldn't walk after being in a hospital bed for such a prolonged period causing her muscles to deteriorate. But she was determined to work through it and she did all of her exercises to build back up her muscles. She came home on an oxygen tank and a walker but she knew she would get better. After a week of being home with us, her health started to get bad again. her whole left side from her face to her arm got swollen because the port they put in got infected and her cancer was spreading fast. She went back to the hospital and was transfered back up to the john hopkins hospital. It was there that she passed away March 2nd. We all stood around her as we watched her go. We had no idea what was happening..it happened out of nowhere. The doctors did nothing. Just pumped her with morphine so she wouldn't feel anything. We didn't even get a chance to say goodbye while she was concious. It still bothers me to this day that just a few hours before that, she was laying in bed doing her leg exercises. My fiance and I were living with his mom and while all this was going on, the house went into forclosure. We lost everything...It's been almost a year and we still haven't been able to get our lives together.