TheHodCarrier 9 years ago
Hi again anu10,
It is just an awful situation, all around.
Your mum is almost inevitably going to get 'angry' because of the pain she is in, and your dad is also almost inevitably going to 'be depressed' by what is happening - as for you, I hope you don't you don't fall apart completely under the strain (I'm sure you will be affected - I just hope, not 'dreadfully affected').
Your friends are probably in the difficult situation of not really knowing what to say, or how to offer to support you - being 'inside these situations' is not the same as 'looking from the outside'.
I'm not - I suspect - all that 'mentally robust' (I had a bad experience around my mum's death, and I was notably depressed for a couple of years - a brief description is online, but MC seems to have an 'anonymity rule' so I can't [it seems] point you at the piece). But my experience was far less bad than yours: and what happened to me, definitely 'left me damaged'.
One last point: do make sure that you and your mum are complaining to 'the senior people' (hospital consultants or the GP) about the lack of adequate pain relief which your mum is receiving - don't just 'comment to nurses about it', comment to the more senior people about it.
Any society and healthcare system which cannot provide adequate [requested - there is a history of 'deep sedation without getting permission from the patient' in NHS behaviour, which isn't on !] pain relief to people who are dying, is not humane (again, I could point at something I've written online about that, but doing so would seem to break the MC 'anonymity' rule).
When you wrote 'They just cant seem to get the pain under control which worries me' it took me back to when my mum was dying. She was mainly interested in dying at home (dad had died at home) but there was a spell for a couple of days when I could see that mum had got 'head pain' which was bothering her, and that bothered me: but my mum very quickly became 'peacefully comatose', which resolved it. But I must admit, during the couple of days when the pain was worrying me I spoke to the GP about pain relief, and it seemed less of a priority to the GP, than to me (although the situation was 'quite confusing'). Whether a person wants pain relief or not, is down to the person suffering the pain (I asked a couple of times 'Do you want to go to hospital - they might be able to get rid of the pain ?' but my mum's responses {nodding by this stage - although I think for a few days my mum could speak, but was choosing not to speak, and was 'nodding' instead} were 'no') - but it is not a nice thing, to see people you love
in pain.