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no_hypocrisy

no_hypocrisy's Journal
no_hypocrisy's Journal
February 4, 2020

For Mom, I think it was the realization of impending death.

Again, without telling her, Dad had her put on morphine, wherein she lapsed into what he called a "coma," but in reality, it was a drug-induced sleep that allowed her to avoid the horror of trying to take a breath and nothing happens. She didn't know.

I was with her at the end, counting the seconds between inhalation and exhalation, until the last breath.

February 4, 2020

Stage IV lung cancer

My mother died of it.

She didn't find out she had it until one week before she died, partially b/c our father made her doctor not tell her, but she figured it out anyway.

She knew she had lung cancer, but she didn't know how fatal it was. She did radiation and chemo. Lost her hair and a lot of weight.

Once it's Stage IV, the die is cast. All you can do is prolong your mortality and do palliative care (pain management). So to speak, Stage IV doesn't last very long.

Mom was a former smoker like Rush. She quit 20+ years before the cancer and it still happened.

As much as I like to be right, one of Mom's last comments was that she shouldn't have yelled at me when I was 9 and threw away her boxes of Marlboros.

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