Natasha Jones, Southampton
My mother, Moira Dorrer, died of bowel cancer in January 2020, aged 67.
My mother had a few health conditions, one being Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), which caused lots of breathing issues. I recall her health slowly declining from the end of 2017 into early 2018. She began struggling to walk further distances and she was even hospitalised with a nasty chest infection. The doctors and my mother all kept saying it was her COPD progressing. My mother was the type that got on with everything that needed doing and didn't spend a lot of time worrying about her health or even getting help sorting her health out. This turned out to be her biggest downfall in her illness.
I started really worrying over her in 2018. I had a really awful feeling and thought it was abnormal how quickly her health had been deteriorating. 2019 came and something never sat right with me that year. I had a little voice telling me to do the things I wanted with her because I felt time was running out. We had a hand cast done and had a beautiful photoshoot done in the sunflowers with my mother, husband and young children in July 2019. By this point she couldn't walk far at all, she wasn't coming to visit me as much as she lived in Christchurch and I lived in Southampton, it was too much for her. Her health even forced her to retire from her job in November 2019.
Her doctors were running regular blood tests but kept telling her it is wear and tear and her lungs were getting worse. She was getting more infections that knocked her for six. Back pain started in the spring of 2019 too. It carried on like this until January 2020. We had had a lovely Christmas with my mum and dad, and my mum was playing with her three grandchildren that day. It's hard to believe looking back on that day that she wasn't going to be with us a month later.
My mother was my world and I wasn't ready to live without her.
The week of the 6 January 2020 she started feeling really sick, was heaving and couldn't eat very much food. Thursday 9 January she visited the doctors after I had begged her to see someone. The doctors apparently felt her stomach and sent her straight to hospital telling my dad it isn't good. At A&E they put her on a ward and did some blood tests which found problems with her liver. She was booked in for a CT scan the next day. I was a bit of a mess by this point, I had a really bad feeling about all of it.
Friday 10 January came around and I remember picking my children up from school and getting a phone call from my dad on the way home saying "Tashy, it's not good. Your mum has secondary cancer in the liver" and just like that my world fell apart. I was 32 and had three children aged nine, six and three. My mother was my world and I wasn't ready to live without her.
She was sent home for the weekend and was going to be booked in for another scan to find the primary cancer. I cared for her that weekend and I couldn't believe how ill she was, she was walking about being nan to my kids two weeks prior and now she was sofa ridden and looked very ill. We had to send her back into the hospital that Sunday as she couldn't keep anything down and was so poorly I was very worried. At this point the doctors hadn't told us whether she was going to be getting treatment. They did the CT scan that night and were planning on the consultant giving us the results on the Tuesday. I lived 30 miles from my Mum so I had to get my husband to take days off so I could go down when I was needed and to care for her. We didn't get the results that Tuesday, she was sent home with nothing. In all honesty I was appalled by the treatment of the hospital and the lack of communication. We didn't know the primary source of the cancer and we didn't know whether she would be having chemotherapy. She was referred to the palliative care team and no one explained anything to us. I remember my mother being extremely upset by this.
The second week after diagnosis she started to go yellow, so I didn't really need to know by this point whether she was getting treatment, I knew it was already too late. She was deteriorating quite rapidly. I didn't even get a chance to come to terms with the diagnosis, let alone the fact she was dying and it seemed to be going at lightning speed. I called up Macmillan as she had them involved and asked them to help track down her CT results and hospital information because we still hadn't been told anything.
I continued to care for my mum all weekend and a couple of days each week. Finally on Friday 24 January we had the Macmillan doctor round and he explained that Mum was dying, there was no treatment, she only had a couple of weeks at best and that the CT scan couldn't find the primary source but her bloods picked up high indicators of bowel cancer. He told us the cancer had spread to her peritoneal area which is your stomach lining, which is why she had struggled to walk and was getting breathless. It had spread to her liver and she had tumours up the left hand side of her body. I was devastated. My mum went into shock too. By this point she was yellow in the face, her urine had gone a dark colour and the skin on her legs was mottled in colour. I asked if she had any bowel changes and she responded saying she had diarrhoea and constipation at times. I was quite upset, I had always told her to look out for the signs of bowel cancer as her mother died of the disease in her 50s. I never got to meet my grandmother because of it. I told mum she was at higher risk as that is what a gastroenterologist told me when I had bowel issues.
On Monday 27 January 2020 it was my mother's 67th birthday and it was hard to celebrate as she was so poorly. She died on the morning of 30 January 2020, just 20 days after her diagnosis. It happened so quickly and none of us expected her to go that day so I didn't even get to go down and hold her hand like I had hoped for. She was still walking around just about up to the day before her death.
I have spent the last two years really lost, my mother was my entire world and my children took her death badly too. I feel so robbed as I never got my mother-daughter time with her after retirement as cancer robbed us of that. She's missed her youngest grandchild's first day at school and she has also missed the birth of her second great grandchild and has another great grandchild on the way.
I'm sharing my mother's story because I want to raise awareness of the signs of bowel cancer and encourage others to always get checked out. We thought her breathlessness was lung related when it wasn't. She suffered from breathlessness, inability to walk bigger distances, subtle bowel changes that she didn't take seriously and back pain. If you have any changes, please do get checked out.
My mother's death has put a huge hole in our lives because she was a wonderful human, a fantastic mum and an even better nan. She was my support network and life has been hard with three young children when we miss her joyful presence in our lives. She was our borrowed angel and life just isn't the same without her anymore.
