Cancer and My Mother

It is the Monday after Easter and my mother has been suffering with back and arm pain for quite some time. The pain radiated from her shoulder and down her arm. She decided to go to the emergency room for help because nothing she was doing was alleviating the pain.

Her first trip to the ER was fairly uneventful, they told her she likely had an overuse injury and to take some muscle relaxers and over the counter pain killers and she would be fine. She went home rested a few days and returned to work. She also made an appointment with her chiropractor since she had long-standing back problems and considered that it could be part of the issue.

Fast-forward a two and a half weeks, my mother is in agony with her arm. Of course, she works for a small dry cleaners and has no health insurance so she has little choice but to return to the ER. They once again tell her that she has an overuse injury and put her off work for a week. During this time, she begins to get sick and cough up blood.

My sister and I are concerned feeling she may have pneumonia on top of her arm injury and my sister accompanies her back to the hospital yet again. While there, my sister tells them she is coughing up blood, again no help. They do not even consider a chest x-ray and begin to treat my mother as if she is a drug addict trying to get prescription pain meds.

This process continues for another couple of weeks and at this point, she is staying with me because she cannot fix her own food. I still believe she has seriously injured her arm, maybe permanently but it is niggling the back of my mind that after a month any injury should be showing signs of healing and less pain.

By the time it is all said and done my mother is driven an hour and fifteen minutes around to a larger city. Saint Bernard's hospital in Jonesboro Arkansas to be exact was the first ones to seriously treat my mom. Due to their diligence within a week, we found out, she had small cell lung cancer and it had spread practically everywhere. All of a sudden, our local hospital was more than willing to give her all the pain medication she could hope for.

My mother was 54 years old when she died at home with all of her children around her. Cancer had spread to her bones, liver and possibly her brain. The last few days were agony for my mother and thankfully, they did not last long. The doctors told us the cancer could have been present for as little as six months, which means at Easter it could have been caught early. It was three months approximately from her first symptoms to diagnosis and less than three months later she was gone.

I write this not for sympathy for my mother as she is in a better place, nor for anger toward the hospitals but for one reason only to inform. If you are having severe pain that just will not go away, especially if it radiates from the back and down your arm please beg, argue and push until you get proper treatment! This is a classic symptom of lung cancer and besides it is better to have an x-ray you do not need than to die needlessly or in pain.