MUMS SPINE CANCER SUPPORT FUND
Here is something I
never seen myself ever doing, raising money for my mum who I never seen getting
cancer. I thought dementia like my gran suffered for
over 10 years before passing away on November 21st 2014 would be the thing to
get my mum later in life, but I really didn't see
cancer ever coming my mums way, not after she has always given and put others
ahead of herself her whole life.
My mum for those of you who don't know her has two brothers (my
uncles) with severe learning disabilities who she took on when my gran took ill,
because of my uncles she took a career path in care and working with people with who
have severe learning and physical disabilities because she knows how hard it is for
families with them. She has been a foster carer for over 11 years providing
weekend stays for kids in wheel chairs with learning disabilities, a very demanding role which
did involve hoisting and a lot of back taxing moving.
MY MUMS CANCER
WAS MISSED AND LABELLED A TRAPPED NERVE
My Mum has Myeloma a rare type of bone marrow cancer and she has
cancer on her spine which she is currently undergoing radio therapy for, her
world has been turned upside down and it didn't need to have been.
You see a few weeks ago my mum had severe back pain, so bad she
couldn't get out of bed for 3 or 4 days, she didn't eat and when she did find
enough energy to get out of bed she booked an emergency doctors appointment. The
doctor she seen told her she had a trapped nerve and they gave her pain killers
to manage the pain, my mum continued to suffer though and was struggling to
walk.
Again she went back to the local GPs, told them the pain killers
were making her sick and told them she was still in pain and struggling to walk,
so they changed her pain killers and again just told her it was a trapped nerve
an muscular.
My mum being in so much pain, she ended up going to see an
osteopath who manipulate your body, after all the local GPs kept telling her it
was a trapped nerve, so of course you will go to someone who deals with trapped
nerves. My mum was in pain still even after that, she was in so much pain she
had the doctor come out for a house call to check her over, again he did his
tests and told her it was muscular and a trapped nerve.
Mum was in so much pain she had to start using a wheel chair,
she was crawling up the stairs to get up them instead of walking and she kept
falling, her legs just went on her multiple times, she was holding onto walls
for support and there was clearly something not right.
I HAD TO TELL THE HOUSE DOCTOR TO REFER HER
FOR A SCAN
Now the doctor who made the house call made another house call a
week later, I knew in advance he would be visiting then so I made sure I was
there because I needed to make sure mum was going to get a referral for her
back. The doctor was visiting to talk to mum about some abnormality in her blood
they had taken previously.
So the doctor came and spoke to mum, told her about some
abnormality in her blood, which my mum is used to being anemic so she didn't
know anything wasn't right, the doctor said to her he was going to refer her in
2-3 weeks for a hospital visit to get it all checked out and he was going to
leave it there.
I spoke to him before he left and asked him if he's giving her a
referral for her back and he said no because he had done some tests and there
was nothing that fits for why he would be referring her to get a back scan.
He told me he was referring her for blood tests in a couple of
weeks and they would see from those if that explained why she was having issues
with her back. So I said, so she could wait weeks for blood tests at the
hospital and then they could say it doesn't explain her back and then she would
need to wait for another referral for her back which would be weeks more.
IT WASN'T UNTIL I SAID ISN'T THAT WHAT
CANCER CELLS DO?
So the doctor asked my mum if she had told me about her blood
results and whether he could talk about them with me, she said he could. He then
started talking about low white blood cell count, some protein that seems to be
replicating because its chains were longer than they should be etc.
I immediately came out with WELL ISN'T THAT WHAT CANCER CELLS
DO! Until that point he hadn't even said the word cancer to my mum but it seemed
like he was trying to avoid saying the word, my mum had no idea how serious that
was until I said that.
In the end I asked the doctor how bad things have to get before
she gets a scan when mum had fell 3 times that morning just trying to go to the
bathroom, fell multiple times the day before, was crawling up the stairs and was
in a wheel chair to get around.
He simply told me I could take mum to A&E if I felt she needed a
scan for her back but he couldn't refer her for one or they would ask why he
referred her and her symptoms didn't fit whatever he was testing her fore.
Well the doctor ended up leaving anyway without agreeing to a
hospital referral to scan her back to see what was going on.
MUM GOT A PHONE CALL WITH A REFERRAL TO
ACUTE PAIN WARD
Well mum got a phone call from the doctor who made the house
visit an hour or two later, he said he had referred her to the acute pain ward
and she could go in the same day, I took mum in and arrived at 4pm, she wasn't
seen by a doctor until 11pm and then they wanted to keep her in the night for
scans.
SCAN SHOWED
CANCER COMPRESSING MUMS SPINAL CORD
My mum didn't get her MRI scan until after 11am the next day,
they took blood and a pee sample, they told my my mum she has myloema (a form of
bone marrow cancer) and she also has cancer on her spine which is compressing
her spinal cord which is why she lost the ability to walk.
The wanted to start her on radio therapy right away for that and
gave her steroids which is what they do for spinal cord compressions. They told
her if they had seen her 3 weeks earlier (when she told her GPs about her
issues) they would of been able to prevent it getting to the point where she
ended up in a wheel chair and couldn't walk.
They told mum they don't know if she will ever walk again
because she has damaged her spinal cord by having still been moving around and
not resting which she should of done if they had caught it from the start.
THE FUND IS TO SUPPORT MY MUM NOW HER WORLDS
CHANGED
My mum has had to stop her care work, fostering and her
community gardening group for people with disabilities, she now has no income
from a job and has to wait 3 months for any disability allowance entitlement. So
not only is she battling with her radio therapy cancer treatments daily and
being left in limbo waiting for results of bone marrow tests to come back, she
has the added worry about how she is going to get by now she is in a wheel chair
and pay her bills and stuff.
Now my mums a strong woman, always been independent, not the
kind of person to ask for help even if she needs it, but there is really a time
for us all to ask for help and that is why I have put this page up so anyone can
help contribute what they can to my mums fund.
I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH TIME MY MUM HAS LEFT
I am still waiting to
hear from doctors on the latest results of
mums blood tests, a bone marrow test that should of taken 10 days to update us
and I've been waiting nearly 3 weeks for that, until that comes back I won't
know what stage things are at with that and whether they will need to start
chemo therapy after the radio therapy.
The more money I can raise for my mums fund the
less worry and more choices she
has open to her, I don't want her to be in a position where finances are something
that prevent my mum getting the best treatment she can.