CC Day 18 – Guest Post by Kaz Molloy

Just over 3 years ago, on 5th December 2013 I lost my Mom, Barbara to a cancer I had never heard of, Cholangiocarcinoma. She had been diagnosed just 5 weeks previously and it came as a great shock to all the family.

I reached out for information and found AMMF and in those 5 weeks I learned an awful lot about this cancer – how rare it is and how, in a lot of cases, like Mom’s, it is often diagnosed very late and therefore untreatable.

Having been diagnosed with cancer myself a few years previously, I knew what it felt like to hear the words “sorry but you have cancer”.  As bad as it was when I got my own diagnosis, it was nothing compared to hearing that Mom had it. I felt so helpless, unable to do anything. I wanted to make everything better and make the cancer go away but I couldn’t. Nothing any of us could do would make Mom better.

Initially they gave her 6 months, then we were told 4 months. In the end she died just 5 weeks after being diagnosed.

Family meant a lot to Mom. She was one of 8 children and kept a list of everyone’s Birthdays blu-tacked to the wall in the kitchen. All the Aunts & Uncles, cousins and all their children. The list grew longer every year.

This photo is one of us all together as a family. Mom, Dad, me, my sister and brother and his daughter. Family get-togethers got rarer as my sister and I live at opposite ends of the UK and it was hard to all be in one place at the same time.

Mom is missed every day; 3 years on and the pain of losing her hasn’t gone away.

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Kaz-Molloy2

Barbara with her family