I will never forget the day my mother was told she had three months to live. She never got over the shock of the abrupt way the news was delivered to her as she lay alone in a hospital bed and she did indeed die, almost three months to the day later. It was the week of 9/11 and as the Twin Towers fell, it seemed to us as if the whole world was crashing down around us.
My mother, a healthy, active 56 year-old, had recovered from breast cancer and been given the five year all-clear a couple of years previously. She went to her GP with a suspected kidney infection one Friday morning in September 2001, and was sent straight in to the obstetrics and gynaecology department at our local hospital.
That evening she had an emergency hysterectomy to remove a massive tumour from her womb. Her consultant told us it was not looking good as the cancer had spread to other organs. We were understandably devastated, but still had hope that our precious, gentle mother - the warm heart of our family - might beat the disease again.
On the day we were due to meet the consultant again to hear mum’s prognosis, I arrived to her hospital room to find her very upset. Her consultant had handed her a death sentence as she lay alone in her hospital bed, without any of us there to hold her hand or help her shoulder the blow.
All she ever said was “he was a bit abrupt”. Typical mum not wanting to upset us, she never told us exactly what he said to her.
When we met him later that morning, he informed us that my mother’s disease was untreatable and he estimated that she had three months left.
The shock of that diagnosis and the way in which it was delivered meant that for the pitiably short time she had left, my mother was never the same person again. She retreated into herself and suffered some kind of a mental breakdown, at one point fearful that she would contaminate us and others if we touched her.
While she was subjected to tests, scans and a horrifically invasive lumbar puncture to see if her symptoms were a result of the cancer spreading to the brain, I pleaded with her medical team to send a psychiatrist, convinced that it was the shock of the diagnosis that was causing this behaviour in a woman who had never had any mental health problems. Nobody listened to us.
I will never forget standing in the corridor of the cancer ward sobbing outside my mother’s room while one nurse after the other passed me by, not one stopping to ask if there was anything they could do to help. Nobody even saw me.
If it had not been for the Galway Hospice Foundation, my mother would have died a sad, undignified death in hospital. They made it possible for her to die at home in her own bed surrounded by the love of her family and close friends and free from pain. The Hospice staff who came to our house at all hours of the day and night were like a beacon in a very long, dark night for our family. We will never forget their dedication, loving support, empathy and compassion.
If the same empathy, compassion and sensitivity had been shown by the consultant who delivered the ‘bad news’ to my mother, the short time she had left might not have been quite so painful.
