My momma, my friend

My momma, my friend

Brooke

The worst thing imaginable happened to us on Dec 20, 2013. We lost my mom to glioblastoma. We had noticed in August/September of that year something was a little off with my mother. She started slurring her words and would garble her sentences. This wasn’t good for a nurse. She was a nurse and worked in the hospital until the day I took her to the hospital cause we thought she was having a stroke. Needless to say it was the day my whole world got flipped upside down.

They took my mom back did the CT Scan to see if she indeed was having a stroke, only to come back and tell me it was something more. I got told the neurosurgeon who would destroy my life would be by to go over the results after she had a MRI. Now take it I’m a nurse and have worked in the field for 10 years like my mother so I knew when I saw her CT it wasn’t good. I knew immediately we would be in ICU and I needed to be there. She got the test done and all throughout this day my mind was omg omg. I need my brother here, I need my dad, I needed someone.

My nurse practitioner friend was in the we at the time and came to make sure I was ok. She was there listening to my mom blatantly tell me she doesn’t want anything done, she wants a DNR, if she can’t be the nurse she has been for 25+ years she didn’t wanna live. That was the hardest thing to ever hear!

My son was her world and I had a toddler who needed to know the strong woman who made me me. The neurosurgeon came and told me it could be 1 of 4 things: one being the glioblastoma, 4 being MS, and the other two being cureable. I could handle MS, or an infection… But cancer no! I didn’t wanna believe it.

We were in ICU from Friday to Monday when they did her biopsy and he was in there for 4 hours and didn’t come back with anything I needed or wanted to hear. He didn’t give me options, he said it was inoperative and that we should get family here. I called the Red Cross to activate my brother to come home. I called her family to let them know. We called the main local hospice and got her in it. My mom wasn’t lucid or very nice. But I never left her side. She had periods of ups and downs.

My mom got to come home with hospice and be completely comfortable or as comfortable as I could make her. I spent all my time or as much as I could by her side and my children could so they didn’t think I was absent. The week before Christmas is when things got bad, no eating, drinking and her pain was unbelievable. She was like my 2 year old where I wanted nothing more then to take her pain away. She knew my wish was not to pass at home and she held on to the minute they placed her in the hospice bed. I was alone, when my mother took her last breath, all I wanted to do was crawl in that bed and hold her. That was the night my world ended.

Opinions expressed within this story belong solely to the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of the National Brain Tumor Society.