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I am in my early twenties, and lost my very young mother to bone cancer on June 9th, 2004.  My family has been members of Kaiser my whole life, and we were never happy with the care we received, it was the price of care that we appreciated. 

My mother's death was a very sudden one.  And I am convinced that she was misdiagnosed and lived with cancer for at least 4 years before she passed away.  Her doctor was the "chief of whatever depart­ment" and was known to be old, tired of the business, and most often an asshole.  He proved in the end what we had all thought from the beginning....he didn't give a crap about my mom, or any of his other patients.  He was ready to retire, and interestingly enough....he is now retired.

It all started in 1999.  My mom started having back pain, and went in for some kind of answers.  After getting the run around, and putting her on pain pills, they finally did an MRI Scan and said she had degeneration of her three lowest discs.  At this time she was only 38 years old, and had been smoking cigarettes since the age of 15.

So they sent her to Pain Management, kept up on her pain pill prescriptions, and basically sent her on her way.  Have a nice life! Needless to say, her back pain never got any better, and every time she would go in to see her doctor, they were never very thorough.  She went along with her life, never knowing that this was a major problem and that her life was near it's end.

Slowly over the next 3 years she became worse.  She had trouble sitting for long periods of time, and could never get comfortable while lying down.  She seemed to always be complaining about her back. 

In the beginning of 2004 she was being seen by her regular doctor, (the jerk), and then he went on vacation in or around April or May.  So my mother was sent to another doctor who was a spinal specialist.  This was about 2 weeks before she passed away. In the exam room, she had to have my dad help her up on the table, and laid there in agonizing pain.  When the doctor came in, she cried to him telling him how much she hurt.  He pushed and prodded on her and lifted her legs up and down off the table.  She yelled "Ouch" and dad told him to be more gentle. Those were very red flags, and the doctor sent her home. He did the MRI and blood work and told her that it looked like possibly severe arthritis but he wouldn't know until all of her results came back.  We waited almost two weeks and never received any results, meanwhile mom was very very sick and weak.  She couldn't walk without a walker, needed help getting dressed, and was barely eating anything. We ended up taking her to the ER before any test results had been announced.   None of us knew how serious it really was, until April of 2004.  Mom couldn't stand it anymore, and demanded that she have another MRI Scan.  She knew there had to be something other than disc problems.  She was very weak, and tired all the time.  She lost her appetite, and was using a walker to get around.  I helped her get dressed after her shower.  It killed me to see her like that.  Once such an active and creative woman, now bedridden with what Kaiser determined was "severe arthritis of the spine".

Kaiser said there was nothing they could do.  They gave her Morphine in pill form as well as Norco and God knows what else.  My mom began to say that she just wished she would die.  She was very strong, but didn't know what she was up against.  By June 5th, 2005 my dad couldn't bare it anymore.  He said we were taking her to the emergency room and they were going to do something or find the problem NOW.  Getting her to go was so hard....the car ride killed her back, she cried and cried on the way to the emergency room.  We felt a sense of relief when we arrived and met with the ER doctor.  For once, someone was going to run some tests and try to figure this out.

The news was not good.  They did a CAT scan of my mom's waist up to her neck.  The doctor came in and told my mom that she had bone cancer in her spine, lung cancer, and cancer of the liver.  It had spread so badly that there was no hope.  No treatment.  Just a matter of time. 

From that point on, they made her as "comfortable" as they could by hooking her up to a morphine drip, and then eventually she went into a coma and passed on.  The time span from the arrival to the ER to her passing away was about 5 days.