Manual Having to Deal with the Fact that My Father is dying from Throat Cancer

Signs that death is near

Contents:

'It was a good death, the kind most people would choose'

We all want this time, without suffering, to do what we want to do. It is very poetic to say I want to die of cancer, but a cancer that is free of pain, free of suffering, free of deterioration, free of complications, free of all that. This is not a cancer. This is a dream. The physiological process of dying from advanced cancer follows no strict path, he says.

This is unusual for kidney cancer, but then nothing is typical for kidney cancer. Any cancer can give any symptoms in any place. Death, he says, tends to come from multiple problems that feed into one another until it becomes impossible for the body to sustain life. Metastases to the bone, he says, eventually kill because they replace the factory of the blood. But bone metastases tend to happen at the same time as liver metastases, and deteriorating liver function also kills you. Any possibility can happen in any kind of cancer. Indeed he flags up the underuse of morphine across Europe as a serious cause of unnecessary suffering in dying patients.

He emphasises, too, that despite the suffering from a failing body, sustained emotional and spiritual support can bring something positive to the experience of dying. Like many people both within and outside the medical profession, Centeno — who works in a hospital setting — feels that something about the way we die within modern medicine is wrong, and we need to find better ways to manage our relationship with death and dying. He contrasts Western attitudes with those he experienced on a recent trip to Uganda, where he spent some time with a community-based palliative care team.

The system is designed to deliver support and symptom relief — not least morphine — to people dying in their own homes.

In our advanced societies, the feeling is that you can buy anything, you have the right to have anything. We have to go back to other ways to do medicine, other ways to do business with death. Can countries like Uganda learn to enjoy the benefits of modern medicine without losing their accepting attitude towards death? We have lost the ability to deal with death.

We all need to learn how to deal with death as a natural part of our lives. The only way that will happen is if we overcome our natural resistance and think about it and talk about it. Home Focus When your time is up. Conversations about dying from cancer Cancer has traditionally been the diagnosis people fear most. The five chosen characteristics were: Why have this conversation? Editorial 9 May 0. News 15 September 0. Our World 21 June 0.

Anticipatory Grief: the nitty gritty

Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Mum was a very private person. She loved order; she hated mess and squalor, and illness is often messy and squalid. She told Vicky again and again that she didn't want to go through more treatment. She didn't want Dad to see cancer killing her. She wanted to die quickly and quietly. She didn't want any fuss.

It was Emma who first told Mum about an article she'd read several years earlier in the Journal of the American Medical Association about voluntary refusal of food and drink as a means of bringing about death in the terminally ill. The author described it as a relatively painless way to die: Typically, a person will take between five and 10 days to die this way and, crucially, they have the option to change their mind and stop the process until almost the end.

Mum just latched on to the idea, Emma remembers. She decided that she was going to stop taking the cortisone that was keeping the tumours in check, and stop eating and drinking as well. She wasn't going to let the disease take over. Like many people, I simply didn't know that choosing to stop eating and drinking is, as Jassy put it, "a Thing".

But it is — it's a thing about which you can find pages and pages of information on the internet, once you have a reason to Google it. There is nothing illegal about refusing food and drink; in fact, feeding a competent person against their will constitutes assault. Nonetheless, Mum was afraid that something would happen to prevent her reaching her goal. She worried about falling and breaking a hip, ending up in hospital and being caught in a spiral of intervention that would prolong her life.

She worried that intravenous nutrition and hydration would be given to "keep her comfortable" if she became unconscious. She had signed a living will expressing her preferences, but such advance directives are generally regarded as worthless unless the dying person has a supportive medical team who understand their wishes and are prepared to act upon them.

Anticipatory Grief Signs and Symptoms

South Africa's legal position on assisted dying is fundamentally the same as Britain's: As in the UK, there have been attempts to clarify the law on end-of-life decision-making processes, removing the grey areas that currently exist. He explains that in , President Nelson Mandela commissioned a report into the legal and ethical issues surrounding assisted dying, assisted suicide and euthanasia, but after being tabled in parliament in , the report was ignored by the ministry of health.

Landman believes this may be because the then minister of health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang , regarded the issue as something of a middle-class problem. Perhaps mothers do die gently, cared for by their daughters, without worrying about indignity and fuss.

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My dad is not just my dad he is my mate and im watching him die i worse watching someone you love so much suffer than to deal with fact that you are doing everything you know how to do for your dad will stay with you and help you later. Now I have cancer myself I understand why my dad sometimes. When we know a loved one is dying, we may feel the pain and sorrow of According to the National Cancer Institute, “Normal or common grief If you are having trouble coping with your feelings, there are a wide range of Combat the stress and anxiety of anticipatory grief by staying physically healthy.

But they don't die quickly, or without pain. Mum had always talked frankly to us about death. Now, with her hands becoming increasingly unsteady and fits of dizziness coming unexpectedly, she was finding the colostomy bag she'd had since her surgery in difficult and humiliating to deal with. She felt that her body was wearing out and, more frighteningly, her head felt heavy and fuzzy.

Anna Wagstaff

I am an only child and my dad was her primary caregiver. At first it was just little things, but now she can hardly put sentences together. My year-old mother has early dementia, and now caregiving shifts over to her. She was the paragon of health for most of her life; has outlived all but 2 the youngest of her 10 siblings, and has reached the highest age in several generations of her family. On the way her eyes were going back in her head. Her new bed was in a private room.

Over the course of a long phone call, Vicky told me that Mum had made a decision. She was going to stop taking the medication that was checking the spread of her cancer, and stop eating and drinking, too. It was the sort of family reunion Mum loved, and in many ways it was like all the other happy times we have spent together, filled with love and laughter. We planned meals together, cooked in Mum and Dad's tiny kitchen, ate and drank together, just as we've always done on family holidays, over Christmases and at other celebrations — only this time it was Mum's life we were celebrating, while she went through the process of dying.

I'd been afraid of seeing Mum since this latest illness. I was expecting to find her diminished, somehow less herself. But I was amazed by how well she seemed.

coping with my dad dying

Vicky had cropped her hair so that she wouldn't have to experience it falling out, and Mum, with the pride in her looks that beautiful women never lose, was obviously upset by her appearance. But to me she looked lovely. She shone with happiness at having all her daughters there with her and Dad. She was full of her usual curiosity and humour. She didn't look like someone who was ready to die, and this frightened me — what if somehow stopping eating and drinking didn't work, and Mum lingered on in pain? What if the process didn't take a matter of days but a matter of weeks?

Part of me knew how much she would hate to be thwarted in her intent; part of me longed to keep her with us for longer, and hoped that, even now, some sort of miracle might happen.

Although Mum was unable to walk unsupported and her hands were very shaky, she was alert and lucid, chatting to us as she always had. Her appetite was small, but she was still enjoying food: Juliet's cake was the last thing Mum ate, on Wednesday 28 March, when her brother visited to say goodbye, and she had a last chat with her sister in the UK.

We were all in tears that morning, except for Mum, who stayed calm and cheerful. I didn't see Mum leave her home for the last time. It's fortunate that Mum was surrounded by people who supported her decision. The management of the nursing home hold the same view.

'It was a good death, the kind most people would choose'

Her GP gave them written instructions explaining Mum's decision and outlining the care she would need. The five of us sisters rallied behind Mum and Dad; we were a team. As I write this, it's difficult to isolate my own feelings and experiences from those of my sisters — who said what, who made decisions, who cried.

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This isn't always the case. It was only after intervention by the couple's family, the local press and medical and legal experts that the attempt was stopped. We laughed a lot over the next few days. We teased Juliet about developing late-onset colour-blindness when she kept putting bottles of red wine in the fridge, while the white stayed warm on the kitchen counter. Jassy and I speculated macabrely about what would happen if the nurses forgot to take down the "Nil by Mouth" sign over Mum's bed after she died — we imagined some poor old dear being moved into her cubicle and waving plaintively as the tea trolley rattled unheedingly past.

Emma and Juliet still haven't let me forget the nightmare mile walk I dragged them on around the suburbs of Johannesburg, possibly the world's least pedestrian-friendly city.