A Week Flies By....

The week went by as deliria for everyone. Dad is still in the hospital but he is much better. He has beaten the double pneumonia (Ah! If only this medical knowledge had existed when his mother had pneumonia in 1931....) but the congestive heart failure is in overdrive. The doctors, all three of them, have told me that this is not something they are able to control anymore and that this is the end. Not the end within a matter of hours but in a matter of weeks or months. Earlier in the week he was gasping for air, they couldn't infuse oxygen through his nose and he was on an oxygen mask. It was hard to understand what he was saying, not just because of the mask but because he seemed unable to control his lips and articulate distinctly. He was moved from ICU to PCCU and now today he is in a regular hospital room where he's sure to get lots of neglect from the nurses. They need to put a posey vest on him at night or he will get out of bed and try to walk around. Then, of course, he will fall. Carmi puts the vest on him when she leaves and takes it off when she gets back in the morning. He might be in the hospital one more day only. Then he will be transferred back to the health care center for skilled nursing. I hear he can be there for 20 days under Medicare. The doctors said he could come home if we had 24 -hour care for him but I didn't feel comfortable with that. He is still on oxygen and he is very weak. His heart rate is in the 80's now but even I can see the irregular beats on the monitors.

On Friday I had the first conversation with a doctor where I was told that this was the end. It made me very sad. I cried at lunchtime. I was worried that Dad didn't know how much I had valued what he did for me all those years. I was sad you had spoken for me in your conversations with Dad, had grossly misrepresented my recollections of him and the job he had done as a father. The principal and my friends kicked me out. Told me they'd take care of my class and close up my room for the weekend. I went to the hospital, and Dad was asleep for most of the time. He had visitors: David, Sonia (his beloved former secretary) and Paul. It was Paul who pulled Dad out of the fog. Paul has a marvelous way of engaging people in conversation by connecting to past experiences and tying them to the present. He kept connecting Dad, "Remember when Cathy and I were on our honeymoon and we stopped in Los Angeles and you took us to Shutters?" "Remember that time Brownie called you and told you about the fundraising?" On and on he went, and at last Dad was completely in the conversation. What a gift he has! And I wonder if he even knows what an impact he had on Dad. After that, when Dad was awake during the weekend, he was lucid. He slept almost constantly, maybe 20 hours a day, but when he was awake, he could engage in more meaningful conversations than before. His color is returning, and I say he's like an old Timex watch. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Of course the ticking is arhythmic, but it's ticking.

Beth and Mark drove down with Haley and Maddie (the terrier) but could only stay about 15 hours. They/We weren't sure how much time we had left with Dad. He was somewhat incoherent during their visit. They were not sure how much he understood of what they were saying. They had to get back home. But since then Dad has improved, and Beth will come back down this weekend. The weather will be beautiful, we will have more time.

I rode my bike both Saturday and Sunday. It was too perfect to describe. I had my iPod on and listened to music, mostly my WOW 2008, and had what I consider to be incredible worship time. It couldn't have been more right for riding. The sky was all blue, there was no wind, there were very few pedestrians cluttering the bike path, and it wasn't too warm or too cold. The wildlife was out! Egrets, pelicans, grebes, mallards. I am beginning to understand why Dad has been a birdwatcher since college. Birds are starting to fascinate me. I told Beth to bring clothes and shoes for biking, that I was going to take her on a ride that would be like heaven on earth.

It wasn't until Sunday morning that I had time alone with Dad when he was awake and alert enough for me to thank him for the job he did parenting me. I thanked him for being the one person who always kept his promises to me, for being trustworthy and reliable, for loving me when I didn't love myself, for believing in me when I felt like an utter failure, for telling me I could learn anything I wanted and that I was brilliant, for supporting me emotionally and financially, and for being my biggest fan. I told him that if it hadn't been for him, I don't know what I would have become. I told him I loved him both before and after I said it. I cried but didn't sob or lose my composure. And when I was done, he looked at me with the most loving eyes and nodded. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. I am so incredibly glad I had that moment with him. I looked up at the clock. It was 9:00 a.m. on March 14, 2010. I will remember that moment forever.

Our long-awaited trip to the oncological surgeon was not what we had wanted. Although your tumor hasn't grown, it's still too large to perform the surgery. He does a nice bypass where he takes some femoral artery or something and grafts it to the SMA above and below the tumor. He can do it if the tumor isn't too large. Yours extends down too far. He would have to miss several of the branching vessels that feed blood to the intestinal tract and he said you would not like that at all. He said your quality of life would be so bad that you would hate him. You would have pain, discomfort, and a severely impaired ability to digest food. Probably a ton of dead intestinal tissue too. Therefore you will have to undergo two or three months of chemo with the hope of shrinking the tumor and doing the surgery then. If that's the case, then you will be on chemo from the middle of March until the beginning of June, and surgery and recovery would go from the beginning of June until sometime in August. And that would only be if the chemo shrinks the tumor enough for you to have the surgery. It doesn't seem like a long shot to us now.

On Thursday you went in for a mediport. It was a minor surgical procedure but they wouldn't let you drive yourself home. I 'picked you up' at lot C at the hospital and drove you to where you had parked your car. You drove yourself home and have been basically fine but caught a cold the next day. At first I didn't know if you were reacting to the procedure but it seems you might really have a cold. Today you got your first go around with the new chemo: two hours in a chair at the oncologist's office and the rest of the 24 hours with 5FU on a pump. You are wearing a fanny back. Laura would say you're a geek. Today you're a brave nauseous geek.