Melissa Mullamphy

Not in Vain, A Promise Kept Melissa Mullamphy

I wrote a letter to my mom, who died of cancer a decade ago. I detail the rage, the pain, the sharp knife of the memory of her. I walk her through my life during and after-the coping mechanisms, the chaos, my medical and psychological trauma. I leave her with a wish to have had more time.

At 68, my mother calls me crying. She's been hiding a distended abdomen. It turns out she has ovarian cancer. A battery of tests reveals she has acute myeloid leukemia as well. We schedule surgery to remove the mass in her stomach, but her platelet count makes the prospect too high risk. We postpone. Days later, they again determine she is too weak for surgery. I am livid. We still don't have an official diagnosis confirmed with a biopsy. The possibility of chemotherapy is discussed, instead of surgery. The fluid around her tumor is sent for biopsy. We are promised a 24-hour turnaround, but four days later, nothing. Until a nurse walks in and states she's ready with the chemo. This is how we learn she has cancer. I read the doctor the riot act. We learn she has stage 3C ovarian cancer. After my mom's second round of chemo, her numbers improve! The tumor seems to be shrinking. We are fighting this. We begin to have hope. We are wrong.

After a month, my mom is scheduled for another round of chemo. She is getting sicker and weaker by the day. We order a cat scan first because we are not going to continue treating with chemotherapy if it isn't helping; we can only see suffering. A nurse practitioner from oncology tells us that the tumor has shrunk by half. We celebrate and schedule the third round of chemotherapy. The day after her third round, her surgeon calls. The nurse practitioner was wrong. The tumor had not shrunken. She is sick, dying, and we gave her more poison, thinking it was doing...anything. She opts for surgery but has to wait until the chemo leaves her body-a month. And at the end of the month, while she wastes away in front of us, they push it to fall. I refuse. I will not leave the room until they get it on the books, they tell me I have to leave. I won't. They can call security. Finally, they schedule it.



The evening before surgery, her surgeon enters the room and asks me to step out. She proceeds to tell me that the surgery will most likely be palliative, and she is extremely concerned as to whether my mom will make it through surgery. But it's wildly successful, more than we could have hoped. What was pitched as a layup was the need to start some cleanup chemo to kill any straggler cancer cells left in her body after surgery, and it's horrific. She hallucinates, becoming listless, has every symptom of toxicity. I tell her doctor, who says she's fine. After the final dose and a very long holiday weekend, her oncologist stops in to see my mom and admits I was right: she's toxic. All it took for me to find this out was Google.

The cancer comes back with a vengeance-worse than before. Nothing is helping her, and the negligence of the hospital does not let up. The last option is to go on maintenance chemo. She becomes deeply depressed. Her condition worsens; she is tired, having fought for seven months, and initiates hospice. In December, she passes away. Life goes on, and I choose to remember my mother every day.