Thank you Gidget.
She had bre@st cancer about 12 years ago and she opted for a lumpectomy then the following year they found a different type cancer in her lung and while she was preparing to have a lobe of her lung removed her eye doctor found a tumor on her optic nerve so she had that zapped with a gamma knife (day procedure) while waiting for her lung surgery then she was lucky and remained cancer free for over 10 years.
On May 28th my son was over at her place napping (he works nights) when she stormed in the room in a psychotic rage saying crazy things. He came home and I ran straight over there where she was still in that alternate mind set but I tried to calm her down and stayed till she went to bed that night.
I came home that evening and called my brother in California for back up because I knew she was going to fight going to the doctor. I called the doctor the next morning and he had an MRI done on her brain that same afternoon and she was fitted for a radiation mask the next day which was a Friday for a 10 day treatment beginning the following Monday.
On the Friday of the first full week of radiation she seemed to be doing well. We stopped to pick up fish fries on the way home from her appointment and I left her sitting at her kitchen table eating around 4pm. At about 6pm my son dropped in on her and found her on the floor in her hallway near the bathroom door. Apparently she had another seizure and blacked out. We had an ambulance take her to the hospital where they found her whole lung was white on the xray when they were checking for broken bones (which fortunately she didn't break anything that day.)
After that all she wanted to do was die. Her doctor talked her into completing the radiation treatments on her brain to lesson some of the symptoms he expected to come like blindness or paralysis and then she could decide what she wanted to do about the lung. We decided at this point to move her to a skilled nursing facility where she had to remain under ""rehab"" status while she was still undergoing the radiation treatments then when they were finish her status was changed to long term care and we signed up for extra hospice services a week ago Monday.
On Tuesday they officially stopped the ""helping meds"" and just continued with the ""comfort meds"". On Wednesday morning the hospice nurse guestimated that she had about a week to 10 days left based on her evaluation of that morning. By that afternoon the nurse called back and told me that she had worsened much faster than she predicted and that we were probably at hours or a few days left. She was gone by Thursday night.
Mom couldn't stand being helpless and she didn't want to put me through this. The will is an amazing thing. According to her she never felt any pain. They did give Morphine to help her breathing at the very end. We will cremate her and take her home to California with us next year and bury her with my father in her family plot.
Now on with the task of emptying out her apartment.
**She was 84.
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