thick on my heart and that is sufficient. Most of the photos were carefully edited and chosen to be posted and don’t tell the whole story. For some reason today I looked on this date in my sent folder, in my email. Now that was a raw moment.
Two years ago, today I wrote to a dear friend that Palliative
Care called me from the hospital. My dad
was in the hospital going through additional blood transfusion and other complications
to his Kidney cancer. The Dr reviewed my dad’s health history with me, all that
I knew too well already. Again, the
reminder of the past. He had the job of
telling me that there was nothing else the medical community could do for
him. He then told me that I needed to
come into the hospital with just one of my siblings (Covid protocol was NO
visitors at all) and have a meeting with my dad to convince him that there was
nothing else to be done and find out what my dad wanted the end of his life to
look like. If my dad didn’t make a
choice, his fate would be to die in a hospital alone. His actual choice to make would be to go to a
Hospice center where we couldn’t be with him (Covid rules) or go home to his
apartment and have us kids assist as his hospice agents and the actual hospice
team visiting 1x a day. We set up a time
for the following day to have the talk.
Soon after the call with PC (Palliative Care), my dad called
me and was extremely sad. He said, “It’s
the end of the line for me” and I could hear him crying. Alone.
I told him we can create how that ending will look like and that I would
be coming into the hospital the next day.
At this point no visitors were allowed in the hospital so he was
surprised I was coming in. Hanging up
from that call was one of the hardest things I have done. Just simply saying goodbye knowing he was
going to sit and think in that hospital isolated from all of us for 24
hours. When it was my mom’s end of life,
also in that same hospital, she shut down and wouldn’t talk to us kids at
all. If anyone else visited her she
would tell them her fears, her guilt for leaving us kids. But to us she was silent. I was able to say goodbye to her, but she
didn’t say goodbye to me. I think in
some ways, I am still waiting to hear it.
Enter in Abandonment issues for life.
(sigh).
A few hours after that call with my dad, he received a call
from his insurance company letting him know they approved him to go to the UW
for a 2nd Opinion on his inoperable kidney cancer. This gave my dad
hope. We knew the logistics were not on
his side. An initial consultation would
be weeks out, then if they felt a surgeon would even take his case, it would be
even more weeks. At this point he was
receiving blood transfusions almost daily.
He was losing more blood than the hospital was giving. Again, since we were in Covid world, the
blood banks were strapped, strained and depleting. The PC team didn’t think it was acceptable to
keep giving him blood when it was in short supply.
For the rest of that day, I also had to work, be a parent to
a struggling college student hours away, a wife, a dog mom, a sister and
friend. I am pretty sure I failed in some of those roles. But being the healthcare point person for an
aging parent doesn’t have boundaries and doesn’t discriminate. It is the world we live in now that people
are living longer.
I posted a photo 2 years ago on this day. It is the photo of my son in the 5th
grade and my dad. It was after a brutal
football game and my son was clearly defeated and my dad is telling him that he
did well. My dad always loved watching
his games from 1st grade flag football through college. My dad supported him. It is that feeling I try to harness in my
memories. Maybe social media memories
aren’t so bad.
