grief Archives – Mummascribbles

Today, 4^th February, is World Cancer Day. The scary figures that Cancer Research have revealed today are that 1 in 2 of us will now get cancer. That’s 50% of us. Half of us. As I was typing this sentence, I received a text message from my mum, telling me her next door neighbour has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. One of her ex friends has battled breast cancer on and off for years. I know of two people of my age who have recently kicked cancers arse. Everybody knows somebody who has been affected by cancer.

I have a story much closer to home. My story doesn’t have a happy ending. Not everyone gets to kick cancers’ arse. Sometimes there is not a battle to win. Sometimes cancer just comes, takes over, and takes them.

My story doesn’t have a happy ending.

The story of my dad.

Dad was (as far as we knew it), a healthy 63 year old. At the end of January 2012, we had just told him that he was going to be a Grandad again to our first baby. Just a couple of months later everything changed.  Dad had started to lose the feeling in one side of his body. It started out with a slight limp when he walked, which turned into him dragging his foot, followed by his arm going limp. He had been to the doctors when it first started and they were referring him for tests, initially thinking that it was musculoskeletal. When it got really bad, we ordered him back to the doctors for a second opinion. It was that doctor that told him he needed to get to the hospital immediately as he thought that he’d had stroke. I remember getting the call at work, standing on the stairs outside my office and breaking down in tears at this awful news, not knowing at that point that the news was going to get much, much worse. It’s horrible that a stroke in comparison would have been good news. A stroke, whilst awful, you can recover from, receive physio to get the limbs moving, make adjustments to your lifestyle to try and avert another happening.

At the hospital, they did test after test on him and the news was that he hadn’t had a stroke. Instead, they had found a shaded area on his brain that needed immediate looking into. He was transferred to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Holborn where they were going to do an operation on his brain to remove some of the shaded area, likely to be a tumour, and do further tests to see if it was cancerous. I worked near Holborn at the time and so after he was out of theatre, I was straight there to see him. For someone who had just had brain surgery, he was pretty chipper (the black eye is from a fall he had in hospital!).

The results came back sometime after, I can’t remember if it was a day, 2 days, but the news was not good. It was a tumour, it was malignant, it wasn’t operable and it was terminal. They didn’t know how long he had but we were given an approximate timeframe of 18 months. That was the longest we had been told that people lived with this type of tumour. It was big, it was mean, and it was already partially paralysing him. It wasn’t long after that the timeframe was reduced to 6-9 months. Sadly, we didn’t even have that long.

Once they were happy with dad’s recovery from the op, he was transferred back to the local hospital. He was then sent home once my mum had things put into place so that it was safe for him to be there. He had carers in four times a day and as my mum was a carer herself, he actually had a lot more care than others would get. Mum eventually went on long term sick to look after him.

I can’t remember how many blasts of radiotherapy he had. I can’t remember how often they were. I think it may have been 6 treatments over two weeks. Whatever it was, it didn’t work. The tumour kept on growing, slowly putting pressure on new parts of his brain. He was ok for a little while. For the beginning part he just couldn’t move around, but quite quickly things started deteriorating. First his speech started getting slurred, then his mind started deteriorating. Then one morning, he woke up and he wasn’t him. He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t move himself and he could no longer be at home. It was then that he was transferred to the cancer hospice based at the hospital and I think it was then that my work told me to forget about them. My director literally told me to not go to work, to not think about work, to not feel guilty about not doing my work even though I was still being paid. It turned out that he was going through similar – his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She sadly died last year.
I was at this point, 6 months pregnant. I spent all day with my dad. I would go home, eat, and go back to the hospital for the evening, usually leaving around 10pm, to go home, sleep and go back to the hospital the next day. Lots of family and friends would visit. His sister from Wales, brother from Clacton, friends from his work. I was never alone in that room. My sister was there all the time too and often I’d bring her food from home!

There were days that we could get things out of dad. There were days when he just slept. Days when he complained in frustration. Days when he was clearly in pain from the knowledge that he was dying.

I remember the day that he had a particularly good day. My sister had warned that it might happen. Her father in law had died from cancer the previous year, in exactly the same hospice and the same thing had happened to him. We got to the hospital and dad was awake, He was partially sitting up and he was talking sense. Whispering, but whispering sense. It was that day that we got my nephew to come up. He hadn’t been. It was a horrible decision for my sister but we all knew that he shouldn’t see him how he was. But on this day, he came to the hospice to say goodbye to his grandad. Dad also spoke to other family members on the phone that day. He made lots of people cry!

The next day he was back to his ill self again. While he was laying there, I read to him and we played songs on the CD player that we’d put in his room. We played the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly, you name it, anything he loved, we played it. On the odd occasion when he was perkier, he put in requests!

We knew his time was coming to an end. He had already been in the hospice for ten days and discussions were had because usually they had a two week period because in reality, people didn’t tend to live beyond this period at this stage of the disease. They needn’t have worried about al that though, because he very quickly deteriorated and we were told it was just a matter of time.

Dad died at about 5.30am on Saturday 28^th July roughly 3 months after his diagnosis. The phone call woke me from my sleep and I knew; I knew as soon as it rang, that he had gone.

It was a weird day. It was horrifically sad but at the same time, for my dad and for us all, it was a relief. We had told him several times that he could go. That we were ready for him to leave us.

We got ourselves ready and went over to my mum’s where my sister was and we talked about him, about how we were all ok, that we were sad but happy that he was at peace, that he was no longer so terribly ill. After that day, I don’t think I cried much. Don’t get me wrong, there were moments that it got me but because I was so heavily pregnant, I at no point wanted to put stress on the baby. It was such a weird time, being incredibly excited about my baby boy arriving but so incredibly sad that dad would never get to meet him.

I still miss dad so much. I think about him all the time. We buried his ashes in a huge woodland burial park, under a huge oak tree and it is the most amazing place to go and visit. There is no sadness. Zach gets to explore the woodland, watch the airplanes fly over and see the odd old school train go past.

I don’t think I’ll ever forgive cancer for taking dad away at such a special time of my life and when he was still so young. It does get easier to forget what a shit time it was and to remember dad how he was before this evil disease got him. I came across some text messages on my phone the other day. A text of me sending him the picture of my first scan followed by conversations from when he was first ill, to when he was in hospital. They have sat on my phone for over two years (I must have even sent them to my new phone!). A part of me can’t let them go yet. It’s nice to read them and pretend it’s his voice saying the words.

That’s the end of my story. I went on to give birth to my beautiful baby boy on 26^th September, two months after we lost dad. He has brought a shining light to the family. He was a reason for us all to carry on and by god there’s been moments when he’s looked at me and he looked exactly like dad. Just for a split second, but definitely just like him. That, and he has no patience, just like his grandfather (and mother!!).

To support World Cancer Day you can join in on social media by writing who you’re uniting with on your hand, take a photo and share it using the hash tag #WeWillUnite. To find out more about the campaign, visit www.cruk.org/worldcancerday.

If you are a blogger and have written a post about how cancer has touched your life or the lives of those around you, you can link it up here.