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“Melissa Mullamphy is a psychologist, health care expert, advocate, and critically-acclaimed International #1 Amazon author.”
No diagnosis. No explanation from a doctor. No staging or prognosis.
The beginning of eight months of nightmare.
Watching your mother die is terrible.
What’s worse is watching her suffer…and knowing she didn’t have to.
No diagnosis. No explanation from a doctor. No staging or prognosis.
One moment Melissa was in her mother’s hospital room with her mother and sister, waiting for the results of a biopsy already four days overdue. The next: a nurse walked in with what looked like nuclear fallout gear and multiple IV bags to tell Melissa’s mother, “Hello, Mrs. Burns. I’m here with your chemotherapy to treat your cancer.”
The tears started. The nightmare began and then unwound over an eight-month period of necessary grief…and totally unnecessary suffering.
In a real-world story that is all-too-relevant, Not In Vain, A Promise Kept chronicles, in terrible detail, the repeated failures of a broken healthcare system.
Medical mistakes, poor communication, false hope. The helplessness of a woman watching her mother slowly die—and, far worse, suffering pain and indignities that did not have to happen and never should have: suffering brought on not by disease but by human error and medical mismanagement. Indignities that carved Melissa’s mother away one small piece at a time until finally, it was just the two of them, holding hands late at night in the hospital with her mother suffering yet again another side effect of cancer, and a promise asked:
“Tell them what happened. Tell them how to keep it from happening again.”
The promise was given. The promise is now being kept.
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Like me, #notinvainapromisekept is eclectic. I call it a #memoir/ self-help. My goal is to keep the promise that I made to my Mom one late night in her hospital room while she was suffering yet another complication of the shit diagnosis of #cancer.
You will learn what my family learned the hard way while being by my Mother's side the entire time. All of it. The mistakes, the emotion, false hope, the waits, and the love we all shared as a family unit at the most heartbreaking time of my life.
Each chapter represents every month, from diagnosis to death, and lessons and tips to help you advocate for your loved ones through example, find your voice, and understand your rights in a very complicated, fucked up, and imperfect healthcare system.
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Melissa Mullamphy is a psychologist, health care expert, advocate, and critically-acclaimed author. After earning a degree in counseling psychology, she worked in a psychiatric emergency room and headed up various non-profit events and organizations before turning to the corporate world and working as Domestic Operations Manager for one of Warren Buffet’s companies for nearly two decades. Putting it all on hold to help her mother during her cancer diagnosis and treatment, she saw first-hand the failures of a broken medical system—a system full of good people working in a critically deficient framework—and has since turned her advocacy to authorship penning hundreds of critically-lauded articles and posts arguing for ways to improve health care systems and patient care—more about her and her story at her website, melissamullamphy.com.
Reviews:
https://www.melissamullamphy.com/
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/--138/not-in-vain-a-promise-kept/
