My beautiful mum passed away last week, she was diagnosed back in June with limited small cell lung cancer, she had chemo and in October we were told it had spread to her bones and brain, she started 5 days of radiotherapy the week before last and deteriorated quite rapidly but we weren't sure whether it was a side effect of the radiotherapy or in hindsight was her body just shutting down, I saw her last Tuesday she was exhausted and her breathing sounded quite shallow but she was lucid and talking on Wednesday she had an appointment at the Christie to be told there was nothing more they could do and she had weeks to live, I saw her that afternoon and again she said she was exhausted but she'd had a 4 hour roundtrip and it had just taken it out of her, again her breathing was shallow and we'd noticed her knees looked bruised but she was lucid when she was awake and said she wasnt in pain, at 7pm my dad called to say she was restless so hed given her some oramorph, I asked him if he wanted me to try and call the Dr out but she said she didn't want an ambulance as she didn't want to go to hospital, she died at 9.30pm. My heart hurts, I don't understand how she can go from being told weeks to live to actually just lasting hours, I'm tortured with thoughts that she was slowly dying those few days and suffering in pain but we either didn't notice or she chose not to tell us, she was only unconscious for a short while, I cant stop the thoughts, I'm trying to think of her now free of pain but we tried countless times over the 3 or 4 days to get someone or a nurse out to see her as she didn't want an ambulance and no-one came should we have gone against her wishes and just called them? Did hearing what she heard that morning make her give up? She was still saying that evening that she wanted to fight. Im just so desperately sad for her and the thought that she suffered, my poor dad is broken and I'm trying really hard to be strong for him and grieve at the same time but i have so many questions that I know I'll never get the answer to. We knew it was terminal and deep down we all knew what the outcome would be but i feel like I never got to say goodbye to her, she was always so positive we never talked about her dying and i don't know if that makes it harder :(
