My beloved mother passed away last month, and me and the rest of my family are devastated.
She had Non Hodgkins Lymphoma which was diagnosed 2 years ago. She was 70.
Chemo had no impact and she was on palliative care since last Summer. For the past 5 months she became very withdrawn, almost overnight. She also stopped talking and would only speak if we pushed her to, otherwise she remained silent and just used hand gestures.
She lost all interest in her her usual hobbies. She would spend all her days sleeping (which we know was caused by the advancing lymphoma) or just staring into space with a blank look. One of the stanger signs of things worsening was that she started swirling water in her mouth and wouldnt swallow it. Sometimes she would cough and the water she would hold in her mouth would get spat out.
She couldnt hold a conversation and lost the ability to use a mobile phone. She couldn't remember things and never knew what day it was. She was incontinent and needed help with all day to day living. She also lost her her hearing for some months, though it did return to some extent.
We as a family put all this down to the rapidly progessing cancer. She was given 6 months to live but still managed to stay with us 8 months later. We didnt have any hospital visits due to Covid shutting down all hospitals. We didnt have any palliative care nurses come to the house much either for the same reason.
It is only now, weeks after her death that we have realised that all this was mosly likely not the cancer but that she had some form of dementia that went undiagnosed.
Having spoken to several friends who have also lost loved ones to cancer, they all said that they did not recognise any of these signs. We are extremely saddened that this happened. We keep thinking that maybe she could have been with us longer if we had realised sooner. But, we didn't. And now mum is gone.
Reading into everything now, it is incredible that we missed it. We mentioned all this to the cancer care specialists in the Haemotology Unit at our hospital in our phone consultations, but they didnt pick up on it either.
Now we don't know how mum died. It is truly awful. We were so fixated on the cancer and doing everything we could to beat it, we missed the very thing that killed her.
Has anyone else heard of or even experienced anything similar? We know mum cant come back but we just have so many questions that are compounding our enormous grief.
