Part 5

So, we enjoyed Christmas. I thought my Dad looked pretty good and seemed pretty healthy. He was going places around town by himself, visiting people, shopping. He would get out of breath, and finally they found that he had cancer in the lung. They had drained fluid out of the lung a few times to help him breathe a little better. They also started chemo again as a palliative measure. In January Eric would take him to chemo. He started getting weaker by then. By February, there came the phone call from Eric, telling me that Dad was really sick that day. He had been going up to his bedroom for a while and staying there day and night only coming downstairs to get coffee. People would visit him and go up to his bedroom. How could I still be in denial? I found him that day Eric called to be very short of breath and not looking good at all. I started making calls to doctors and eventually had hospice come in, which I really had to work to get him to agree. His big thing was that he didn't want anyone coming into his home, like a home health aide. I just wanted them to set him up with nurse visits and home oxygen and assitive devices, which they did. March came and went and by the time April rolled around, I had started working at the hospital. I had an inkling things might be getting bad, although still in a huge amount of denial, when he wasn't strong enough to come to Kaylee's 2nd birthday party. He loved her so much, for him to miss that, should have made bells and whistles go off for me, but I just let it come silently, refusing to accept or acknowledge it. I remember the phone conversation I had with him when he told me the doctors had decided it was time to stop chemo, he was getting too weak and it wasn't working anymore. I regret that he had to go to that visit by himself and hear that alone. I asked him how he felt about that and he simply said he didn't know yet. A few weeks later, I got the call from Eric that he hadn't slept very well, couldn't breathe, and Eric had been helping him go to the bathroom. My dad had decided, after he had originally said he wanted to stay at home, that he was ready to go as an inpatient to hospice.