Preparing for losing my mom - update advice please

[Kassia]

@PeterPan what a lovely idea.  

[Katy]

16 hours ago, Halftime Hope said:

I'll chime in here a bit and take what I'm going to say with a grain of salt...it may or may not be helpful.   

My mom was 84, healthy, and was diagnosed with breast cancer in February, and then pancreatic cancer in April, right after having a lumpectomy and deciding she didn't want chemo or radiation for the breast cancer. The pancreatic cancer was deemed inoperable and untreatable, but she had abdominal surgery to move things around internally to keep her comfortable longer.  About a month after the surgery when she was well enough to be home, she started thinking about what she wanted to do, and being the "alternative medicine" person that she and dad had always been, she decided she wanted to go to Mexico for treatment. She and Dad could not have gone by themselves, and neither my brother and I were in an "easy" place to go with them and stay during treatment. I told her I would not consent to taking her until I had done some research on treatments and recovery rates for advanced pancreatic cancer, and until I had talked to the clinic doctors myself. My research took some time, a week or so, and I found a clinic in NY that seemed to have a very good protocol with quantifiable recovery rates, but by then she had lost her will to fight -- the protocol (diet and meds) was mentally overwhelming for her. She was back to her old normal, non-agitated self, pleasant to be around again, but she had resigned herself to living well and not fighting the cancer.  That's fine in some cases, but it was definitely her Plan B, not her Plan A. 

To this day I regret not having shelved my own fears and my own inflexible sense of family priorities to fight alongside my mom if that's what she wanted. I cannot imagine how that felt to her, to know that her daughter wouldn't help her try unless there was a good chance it would be successful.  

I'm grateful that she lived very well for another 7-8 months, and that we had a wonderful Christmas together as a family. But I'd do it differently if I had the chance. 

So my encouragement is to slow down, find out what your mom really wants, and to the best of your ability in the context of all your family needs, help her accomplish that.  

 

 

Gently,  I'd encourage you to give yourself some grace.  It wasn't that you weren't willing to help her.  You wanted her to not spend the last months of her life getting scammed, and you wanted her to spend remaining time and money on something that might actually help.  I'm sure you're well aware of how slow-growing pancreatic cancer is, she'd probably had it for more than 10 years by the time it was diagnosed.  It may not be that she'd given up the will to fight so much as passed through the stage of denial and decided to accept it. You not choosing to take her to Mexico until you researched it wasn't fear, it was good sense. How she reacted was her choice.  None of this was your fault.