It's been a rough week.
She's been in pain a lot. There have been those scenes where she's crying in her sleep and I'm cooling her brow with a damp cloth. When she hasn't been in pain, I've been terrified of leaving for work, sure that she'll be gone when I get home. I stayed with her. Work just seems an absurd, abstract and irrelevant distraction.
Yesterday we had the meet with the chemo doc. The biopsy confirmed the nodes in her lungs were cancer. The growth rate was characterized as aggressive. He noted the cancer is highly resistant to chemo, having doubled in growth during treatment earlier this year. He'd recommend us to a trial study if we wish, but we'd have to move to where ever the study was being performed. Nothing like that happens in little rural America.
He can make her comfortable and somewhere in the future, he can try to slow the growth with more chemo. But we know the chemo makes her sick. It diminishes quality of life. We should chose that time wisely. We should travel and do, while we can.
This morning she finally had the talk with our son. He's 21. She laid it all out. I stayed back a bit. It was their time, he's very close to his mother. He and I will have what she has not, time.
I've been pre-writing more, planning what I want to write about us. I cannot tell you what it has meant to me to be able to do this, how much my head has cleared as I've gone along, what it means to hear the feedback from you people I've never met. I'll continue, it just takes time and that really is an incredible commodity right now.
Just hang in there Dave. The words can not take away the pain, but it helps clear your head.
ReplyDeletek - so this may not be that relevant but my aunt had breast cancer, she had a mastectomy followed by chemo. I don't need to tell you how ill the chemo made her. It didn't work so she had another mastectomy and more chemo. A year later she was dead. That year was not living - she was either recovering from operations or sick from chemo.
ReplyDeleteI think there comes a point when as hard as it is you have to make a choice between a shorter time that has some quality and smiles.
Or prolonged agony.
I would not want to have to make that choice.
As much as we can be we are here for you dave.
Tati and I have talked this out quite a bit. I lost my mother in 2000 to lung cancer. We had 11 days from the time it was discovered to the time of her death. That meant there was no chemo or radiation.
ReplyDeleteIt did mean though, that she spent the last of that time on breathing machines. Last 3 days I think. We had time to talk prior to that, time to say what we wanted to say. It was the end bit that stuck with me. They had been pumping 100% O2 into her lungs for 2 days. The docs said it was destroying what little lung she had left. We decided to take her off the machines. The doc said we would only have a few moments and that turned out to be true.
Point being, Tati does not want that. She doesn't want to be gravely ill and dying at the same time. That is why we are waiting on the chemo. We know she does not respond well, her platelets, white and red blood cells drop off precipitously while under chemo, she gets nauseous, and nothings smells, tastes or sounds like the real world. I think we will carefully evaluate if and when chemo is to be introduced.
We don't know how we'll manage all this, I suspect we will consult with the docs and perhaps even Hospice Care.