Living with Brain Cancer

My grandmother is 86 and was diagnosed with brain cancer last year. There was no sign whatsover that she had any problems until she fell and hurt herself…they did a scan and there it was…a tumor on the right side of her brain. It was discovered right around her 86th birthday and we found out that it was malignant. Not something one wants to hear affecting a family member. I was shocked and still am to a point. My grandmother underwent surgery to remove the tumor (or at least as much as can be removed) and then went through radiation.

I visited my grandmother about 1 week after the surgery and she looked pretty good considering. Once the radiation treatments and meds started, she went downhill. I then went up to visit her again a few weeks later and i will never forget what i saw–she was confined to a wheelchair and her hair was completely gone. She was unable to speak very much at all as the radiation/tumor affected that part of the brain. It was not the grandmother that i knew.

As the holidays came around everyone started to agree that she would probably be gone soon after the holidays passedShe was going downhill and after visiting her at the beginning of the year i thought i said my last goodbye. Then my uncle was guessing she would be gone by March…March came and went…she was still there. It got to a point where no one could guess because she would not go anywhere.

She is still here…almost 9 months after the brain tumor was discovered. She now has 24 hour care with great nurse aides that do an outstanding job with her. She is unable to speak clearly at all, although she can get some words out at first but after that, it becomes “mumbled.” She will never walk again as there is some neurological issue with her legs that keeps them crossed (according to what i was told). She has lost a lot of weight and looks very frail…but one thing that she has not lost yet is the will to live. Prior to the brain cancer being discovered, she did everything on her own…shopping, around the house stuff, cooking, etc…although she never filled up her car with gas herself…she took it to the full serve station…she has been one of the strongest people, if not the strongest, that i have ever known…to go from being so independent to completely dependent was something i thought would have “done her in.”

In many ways, the grandmother that i know/knew is gone…but in other ways i know she is there…all she has to do is give you a “look” and you know she is there. As i said, she is a strong person–after all she was in the Marines back in the day-around world war II.

I have been very close to my grandmother, she lives about 150 miles away but i still will visit her every 2 or 3 weeks because i know that she enjoys it. While i have come to the conlusion that she will eventually die, i am not sure how “prepared” one can really get for when the actual event happens.

What is strange is this…cancer has not run in the family so we have no clue how she was stricken with brain cancer. But seeing her go through what she has gone through is scary but at the same time heartening because she has kept the will to live and when it is time to call it a day, i hope it is on her terms.