'I watched tumours breaking through mum's neck as she begged me to let her die'

Woman tells how she will forever be traumatised by the memory of being forced to watch her mum suffer a horrifying, “inhumane” death

“All we know how to do is keep people alive in this country, we don't know how to let them die.”

This is the traumatised verdict of a daughter forced to watch her mum suffer a horrifying, “inhumane” death.

Laura Perkins will forever be haunted by the memory of her mum, with tumours breaking through her neck, begging to die.

Joanna, 72, had been diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer in 2018. It later spread to her liver. Another primary cancer was then found growing on her tongue.

The mother of three endured years of chemotherapy and then had surgery to remove part of her tongue, which cost her the sight in her right eye.

Laura, 45, is speaking to The Mirror because she says “it is important for people to hear” about the hell her mum and family experienced.

“The point where the tumours came through her neck is an image I just can’t ever unsee, it was horrible.

“It haunts me. Someone you love the most in the world and there is nothing you can do.”

Those were the last few, agonising weeks of Joanna’s life.

The dance-loving businesswoman was left skin and bones and barely able to eat or swallow. Even her water had to be thickened into a very light jelly.

Her mum’s medical team had warned it was more humane to die of liver cancer than mouth cancer - so they concentrated on the latter.

Laura said: “She was so afraid of the nighttimes, of being in the dark and starting to choke. I asked her if she’d like me to sleep in the bedroom with her and she said ‘yes’.”

She described a putrid smell in her mum’s room, saying it was a sign the tumours were close to breaking through the surface of Joanna’s parchment-thin skin.

“I set up the mattress to sleep with her and I remember crying because I didn’t know how I was going to cope with this smell. But I wanted to lay there with her, just to calm her, she was like a little baby. I'd tell her; ‘It’s okay mum I'm here’.”

Then, a few days later, Laura found her mother sitting on the end of the bed with noxious pus oozing from her neck.

“It was just coming out of her neck, underneath her jawline,” said Laura:

“She had no hair, she had her eye patch on. She was skin and bones, rocking back and forwards saying ‘I want to go, I want to go’.

“I just cried and said ‘Mum, I know you do and I wish I could help you go but I promise I will help you sleep’.

“That became my mission then, constantly calling the palliative care nurses, mum needs more sedatives, mum needs more morphine but even then there’s only so much they can give.

"There was constantly pus coming out of it so she had to have a bag attached to her neck which would fill up with pus and have to be changed constantly.

“My mum never wanted her daughters to hear that, to hear her begging to die. She was utterly depressed and none of us could comfort her in the end.”

“My mum didn’t want to die, she wanted to live and she would say to my older sister ‘I don’t want to die.’

“One of the reasons she continued with treatment is because she desperately wanted her younger grandson to remember her and it broke her heart that she wasn’t going to be there to see him grow up.

“She wanted to be his nanna and he was only two at the time.”

Laura is urging the MPs to vote and stop this happening to any other families.

“I witnessed my gran die at the grand old age of 94 years old, a very peaceful death, very quick in hospital with most of her family around her.

“I honestly thought that’s how everyone dies and when my mum got sicker and sicker I remember my friends saying to me ‘don’t worry she will be asleep most of the time’.

“That never happened, it was just exhausting, she fell out of bed the day before she died and the ambulance was called and they didn’t want to take her to hospital, afraid she would die.

“And I thought, Oh my God, all we know how to do is keep people alive in this country, we don' t know how to let them die. Sometimes that is the best thing for them.

“There are desperately vulnerable people who are dying in really inhumane, cruel circumstances.

“Modern-day medicine can only take you so far and in my mum’s case it wasn’t far enough. The fact that people in Britain today are dying like my mum did just blows my mind.”