Monday, March 31, 2008
| Que Sera, Sera Current mood: sadMy dad sleeps pretty much all the time now. When he’s awake, most of what he talks about are memories from past years – stories, anecdotes, his reactions as a child…that sort of thing. It’s so hard to go see him and have him sleeping every time I try to be with him. Even though he’s still alive and interacting, I swear sometimes it seems like he’s slipping away before my eyes. I just want to reach out and grab his hands – so cold and thin – and hold him to keep him here with me. I can’t believe that this is the man who carried me on his shoulders, played “ghostie-beebies” at bath-time when I was a toddler, who fenced with me and played catch in the front yard. I tried so hard at those things; I wanted to please him so much. Now, he eats a few bites of food at a time, because he wants to please me so much. He was the strongest person I knew when I was young. No jar lid stood a chance against him – there was nothing he couldn’t fix. Now, he weighs 109 pounds and a rare afternoon of running errands is stressful. How cruel the years are! I can’t bear watching my parents, these people who were the paragons of my young world fading before my eyes. I can’t look at anything anymore without seeing death and loss – the old black and white movies I loved show me only actors who are gone now. All that remains are just celluloid shadows of vibrant humans who had full lives and people who loved them. The same thing for music and for literature – I can’t find joy in any of it anymore. They’re gone. They’re never coming back. It hurts to see people working in their yards, tearing up green things and throwing them on trash heaps. I look at the faces of my friends and know that I’m going to lose them one day, too. My friend’s cat killed a lizard while I was over the other day, and I nearly had a breakdown. Every single aspect of my life is steeped in death. I can’t get away from it. Death and loss have me backed into a corner, and all I can do is wait for them to come steal something else precious from me. There is no other option than waiting – no fighting, no outwitting. Feeling this way is wearing on me. It takes all the strength I have to be cheerful around my dad. I leave his house and I make it to the car and burst into tears from grief and frustration. I can’t save him and I want to more than anything else in the world. There was some thought that he could join another new study – this one involving radiowaves. The doctors implant tiny electrodes into the center of the tumor, then zap those electrodes with radio waves, thereby heating the tumor to 130 degrees and killing it. Further research on my own shows that this doesn’t really work on those whose cancer has metastacized and spread. Dad is very excited about it nonetheless and we are working towards that as a goal. Ah, yes. The latest info: Dad’s cancer spread to a spot under his arm. He has a 5cm tumor in his liver and a 3cm tumor under his arm. He has had 5 chemo treatments in 3 weeks, but chemo has since been suspended as his blood count is now at 41K. Normal healthy people have a blood count somewhere in the 150-450K range, and spontaneous bleeding occurs somewhere in the 20K range (if this provides some perspective on the situation.) He can’t continue his chemo at this point because he can’t fight it off right now. I worry about all these weeks he’s been sitting there with no chemo – are his tumors growing? Metastatic liver cancer is very aggressive, very fast growing. Is it taking advantage and taking over more of his insides? I have been researching everything I can find about it – trying to make sense of it all. You really can’t make sense of it all, though. You just have to let it happen. I think a lot about the old Doris Day song, “Que Sera” – Que sera, sera What will be, will be The future’s not ours to see Que sera, sera. Maybe someday, I can just take those words and have them give us all some peace. |
