Bowel Cancer - An Untimely Death?
| Author: Vanessa Holmes | Published: 21st April 2008 22:10 |
This is the hardest thing I have ever had to write. Even now I have to take deep breaths to stop myself from crying. I want to write it. I want to tell my story.
January 2005 I got a call from my mother - she seemed distant and unlike my mother didn't really want to talk to me. She called again the next and was the same. I kept asking her what was wrong but she said ‘Oh nothing'.
A day later she called me and said she had had some results from the doctor and he said it was cancerous. My mother was in Jamaica at the time looking after her elderly mother. I told her to get on the first plane back home - which she did. My husband and I picked up my mother from Heathrow and my brother picked up my sister from India. She had just come back from a health week!
My mother seemed to have shrunk but as I hugged her I told her it would be alright. But it wasn't. She took lots and lots of tests, she had surgery, chemotherapy. She couldn't have radiotherapy as her kidney was not strong enough.
On 9th February 2006 my mother died. Some people may wonder why after two years it still makes me sad. It is because having looked into bowel cancer I know that she need not have died. If the cancer had been caught early enough she could have been treated.
Fact: Bowel Cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in the UK, affecting men and women equally. Every year over 35,000 people in this country are diagnosed with bowel cancer - that's someone every 15 minutes; nearly 16,000 people in this country die of the disease - that's a life every 30 minutes.
When someone you know and loves dies it is very painful when you know that had they received treatment they may not have had to loose their lives it is even more painful.
