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Losing My Mom


Cazador64

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Posted

Hello everyone,

My name is Hunter.  I am 25 years old, I live with my parents and this is my story.  My whole story began in March when my mom started complaining about having pain in her bottom. She thought this was hemorrhoids and was doing at home care for her hemorrhoids.  She accidentally gave herself frostbite while sleeping on an ice pack and it got really infected.  It was so infected that when we took her to the ER they had to do emergency surgery.  This was at the very start of the Pandemic and we couldn't even be with her the week she was in there.  She came home and we had to do wound packing.  But, even just touching her bed put her in intense pain.  On May 1st, my dad started having stomach issues that my mom later started having.  My mom got so sick she couldn't hold anything down and we had to take her to the ER again.  Both my dad and her had contracted a C. Diff. infection.  Her infection was so bad that it destroyed most of her colon and she had an ileostomy surgery on May 13th.  She finally got to come home again on Memorial Day.

The first week of June, mom was laying in bed when her abdomen suddenly swelled up very large and she was in intense pain again.  We rushed her to the ER yet again and they determined it was her bladder.  They quickly stuck a catheter in her and drained an outrageous amount of urine.  A CT scan showed a large rectal mass was blocking her bladder.  We spent those next two weeks doing three biopsies that all came back inconclusive.  After the hospital could not make a determination as to what we were facing, she was referred to a surgeon in a larger city nearby.  My dad needed to get back to work, so I became her full-time caretaker on June 22nd about a week after she got home.  My dad and my mom went to meet with the surgeon in the larger city and he quickly determined it was cancer.  However, he told us that it was very treatable and had not spread anywhere.  So, we were given a chemo plan and had our first chemo treatment on July 14th or 15th.  She was to get six treatments, do scans and see if we could remove the tumor.

However, what happened was she had a very hard time with the chemo.  She only made it through three treatments before she dropped to 96 pounds and her WBC bottomed out.  Due to what I attribute is incompetence from the oncologist and her team, my mom was never able to get back to chemo.  Her last treatment was on August 17th, and we had been trying to get her back on chemo ever since.  We switched to a new oncologist, and met with him on October 3rd.  He told us that her cancer was aggressive, the tumor was growing like wildfire and that there was basically nothing that could be done.  We ended up going to a cancer center on October 14th 5.5 hours away, and they offered her radiation to help shrink the tumor some.  They did 15 rounds and we came home on November 17th.  We go back for scans next weekend, but I don't think there is much more they can do.  She has dropped back down to 90 pounds and is not in any shape at all to get anymore chemo.  Her scan from the cancer center in mid-October showed the cancer had metastasized extensively into her liver and she had developed ascites. 

No one at this facility has given us a time frame, but I don't think she has much longer.  I have worked as hard as I could and done everything I could for her (taking care of all her needs, feeding, bathing, etc.) since June and it is just so hard that this is the end result we are facing.  I very much am someone who loves people and leans on people for support during hard times, but not being able to physically be around anyone other than my household for months on end has made it very hard to cope.  I'm only 25, and so many people my age don't know what this experience is like at all and I can tell they don't know what to say or do.  And they really just don't understand.  I found this website and I thought I would share my story here so that I could just simply tell all this to someone who might understand.

 

I fully believe God is in full control of this situation.  I know He loves my mom and He loves me.  As I've told my mom, no matter how this goes, she either gets to keep living or be with God in Heaven.  Either way, she is a winner.  I love my mom so much.

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Posted

Dear Hunter,

Thank you for sharing your story with us. You are a very brave, mature and kind young man. I'm so sorry to read about everything your mom has gone through. 

My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family during this difficult time.

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