Missing mum’s illness

My husband and I were working in Sheffield and because of the travel restrictions we could not travel home to India for 1.5years. The longest either of us had ever spent without seeing our parents. The only reason many of us even considering moving away from homes and families for work is because we assume we will be able to travel to them when they need us. We don’t leave old and ageing parents alone because we expect them to deal with their problems alone. Normally we visit 3 times a year and help with maintenance at home and parents’ health and wellbeing. We spend all our money and time for holidays visiting our parents and looking after them. But despite our ability and willineness we were stopped – and it had a terrible effect on our family. For that we – esp my husband – can never forgive the people who introduced travel restrictions and other requirements in UK and India.

My mum in law developed cancer and the only symptom was her back pain which intensified very quickly in early 2022. Since she had always had some back and leg issues it did not occur to her that this might be cancer. We were only seeing her face on the video calls and though we were worried about her pain we could not see how much weight she had lost. When we were finally able to go home she was already at stage 4 and a week after we reached home she fell down in the bathroom and has never been able to get back to her feet. If we had been going home regularly we’d have seen the weight loss and the wobbliness of her walk – very unusual for her – right in the beginning…. more importantly we would haev taken her to a doctor right when the pain began. Her orthopaedic told us that when she finally saw him a few days before we got home, he was already considering the possibililty of cancer but did not want to scare her since no one was around to help her with tests and hospital visits. And that is true – she would not have gone to any doctor without one of us accompanying her. The lockdowns and mandates prevented us from seeing parents as frequently as we wanted to, as frequently as they needed us to… and in the absence of a system friendly to old people there was no one to help my mum in law with her diagnosis, vists and tests. Her cancer need not have progressed this far or caused her an year of harrowing discomfort and pain and no hope of a recovery or relief from pain.