W When Doctors Stopped Seeing My Nan

Mama is dying.

She is only an empty vessel of the woman I once knew. The woman I once loved. It is breaking my heart, knowing that her almost weekly complaints for years on end were dismissed by the doctors. How many times the ambulance had to collect her and take her to hospital? How many times did she sit in her GP’s surgery in Hungary, yet nobody took her seriously?

Why?

Because she has dementia. She has a history of being forgetful. That was her doom. That was her end. That is when in medical circles she has stopped being a human to look after and examine carefully.

That’s why she was dismissed so many times by doctors and from hospitals, because she must not know what she’s talking about.

She was written off from the moment she was diagnosed.

Two weeks ago, she vanished from her home. My mum couldn’t find her anywhere. She drove around the city, checking every place Mama usually goes to. The hospital rang her several hours later to say she was there, she’d fallen on the street and had been lying in the cold snow for hours before someone found her and called an ambulance.

Even then, she was discharged the next day from the care of professionals and given aspirin to recover. Her tummy pain started to get stronger and stronger. She could barely walk and fell in her flat, spending several hours on the floor before my mum found her. Mum moved Mama to her place the next day. She was barely eating and complained again about her tummy pain. One night she was so distressed by the pain that she asked my mum to call the ambulance again.

My mum was incredibly anxious about it, because the ambulance service and the hospital had already marked them as lunatics who have nothing better to do than call them out and waste their time. She asked Mama if she was in really serious pain, if she was sure she was in agony. Mama said in her dainty, weak voice: “It is up to your discretion. You can decide.” She resigned already. She gave up.

My mum rang the ambulance straightaway.

They took Mama to hospital even though they complained about Mama being lunatic and not lucid to know if she is in pain or not, and she’s been there ever since. For almost two weeks now. She spent her birthday there, the 20th of January. She turned 88. That was the last time my mum could go in and call me and my sister on video chat so we could speak to her and wish her happy birthday.

Then a flu pandemic hit the country and the hospitals went into lockdown. My grandma was alone with strangers, with her demented brain, with her forgetful spirit. She couldn’t get in contact with us and soon, she started to perish. Her brain was no longer stimulated by conversing with us, by being visited.

Also, that’s they found a final-stage colon and pancreatic tumour in her, something they would have noticed if they’d actually examined her the last fifteen times she was in hospital, or if her GP had actually listened to her and referred her to oncology or gastroenterology to check her out.

The doctor who looks after her now is finally a person with a conscience, and he looks after her well. But it’s too late. He said he’ll have to create a stoma through her belly to lead out her colon, as the tumour sits so low in her abdomen that it’s actually blocking her excrement from leaving her body.

We were also prepared for the possibility that she won’t survive the surgery, or even if she does, she won’t recover before the cancer kills her. So we only have choices between bad and very bad outcomes.

So unfair. So undeserved. So disgusting, the treatment and the attitude she and the family received for years, all because of how we tried to help her get a diagnosis.

Today, my mum fought to be let into the hospital, regardless of the quarantine, and finally they called me on video chat so I could see her one more time. Mama was ashen. She was weak. I could barely hear what she said. Within four minutes, she was so tired she couldn’t speak anymore. They had to hang up.

And my heart broke.

I didn’t hear what were possibly the last words she’ll ever say to me. I told her that I love her and that she’ll feel better after the surgery, which will probably be true only, because she won’t be on this Earth anymore.

I have so much anger, so much hatred towards injustice now, I cannot even explain. Instead of being able to grieve the possible, and upcoming loss, I am eaten alive by anger, just as she is eaten alive by her tumour. It’s so messed up. I could scream. I’m in turmoil and everything is upside down. But at least she will soon be at peace, and we will stay here, angry and heartbroken.

Tomorrow they’ll take her for pre-surgery preparation, giving her a few units of blood to give her a chance of surviving the procedure on Monday. It will happen on Monday, on the second of February. I really hope the Universe will give us the best outcome, but only what is best for Mama. The rest will settle with time.

Will it be death on the surgery table?

Will it be a medically induced coma, so she can dream about a better world, about her long-lost husband and her early, dementia-free life when she was truly happy?

Will it be a painful recovery so she can suffer through a few more months but say proper goodbyes? Even though the chances for proper goodbyes were lost long ago, when her dementia got worse?

It’s like waiting for the executioner’s blade to fall. And this execution started to pend five years ago, when she was diagnosed with dementia and lost all her rights to be properly treated.

Who knows.

Time will tell.

Life will choose.