Tag: cancer
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This blog post is probably going to make less sense than usual. It's certainly going to be out of order semantically; I'll try to minimize the disjunctions as best I can and I apologize in advance. Lately I haven't had the time (thanks to log4shell) or the compute cycles (thanks to my mental health) to sit down and work on this post. Everything's been laying pretty heavily lately, and it's been an effort to just make myself sit down and work on this post. I keep thinking of little things to post to keep those switches in my head going …
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The title pretty much says it all. If you want to punch out now, go right ahead.
There's no other way to put it. No polite way, no delicate way...
Cancer is neither polite nor delicate.
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The evening of 12 October, Lyssa chose to spend the night at bedside with mom while cousin Suzy and I went home to get some sleep. I don't remember exactly when we crashed but it was reasonably normal for us, maybe 2300 or midnight.
At 0622 hours (which I don't think I'll ever forget), Suzy knocked on my bedroom door and said that Lyssa …
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Mom was moved to a hospice facility yesterday. Let's start there, because today's been a day.
Things were all over the place today. I had a good quote lined up to open this post with (it's funny what subprocesses in your head can do when things are going pear shaped) but it's kind of pointless at the moment.
Suzy and I drove over to the hospice this morning to see mom and talk with the hospice team to figure out what to do and how. Lyssa took a cab in before we let. The nasogastric tube is still in place …
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Mom was moved to a hospice facility this afternoon. For how long, we don't know. We're supposed to meet with a social worker tomorrow morning to figure out what to do next. Technically she's still under palliative care, but she's wasn't able to stay in the hospital in her condition.
Mom is still insistent that she wants to go home. To die.
That's going to take some doing, and it's not something that we can decide to half-ass, nor is it something that we can decide to do as we please (even on my mother's say-so). Her state has to …
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Judy and I slept at mom's bedside in the hospital last night on recliners that the nursing staff was kind enough to bring in. Mom's fever spiked to 103 degrees Fahrenheit in the span of about four hours, she was febrile, and her breathing was agonal. In an attempt to make her comfortable, the nurses gave her a couple of doses of IV zofran and reglan, with a side of haloperidol for anxiety and fear. Later in the evening they gave her a dose of IV benadryl because my mom was scratching at her arms and chest, and was making …
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Someone asked me why these blog posts are always backdated. The reason is that I can't write about a day's that's happened until that day's... happened. Plus, if I wrote it up late at night and posted it, probably nobody would see it (the churn of social media being what it is). And, it seems wrong to liveblog somebody's impending death. Especially my mom's.
I guess the cat's out of the bag.
Yesterday morning when I woke up, I made myself breakfast and coffee and then took Dora outside in her stroller for some fresh air. Around my second cup …
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Every time I sit down to work on this post, something else changes.
A long time ago, when my grandfather was taking care of my grandmother when she was in the hospital, he used to come home and say that she had good days and bad days. I was too young to understand what that meant. I think I do now. Some days mom looks and sounds like hell and sleeps a lot, other days she's awake and glad to have company.
I'm all kinds of messed up right now. My short term memory is still hosed from not sleeping …
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Where was update #3? Right here.
As I write this, it's 1930 hours UTC-4 on 2 October 2021.
I am exhausted, fried, kind of in shock, and numb. My short term memory is shot to shit so I'm going to do the best I can to reconstruct the day.
I'm writing it a day ahead of time because I don't have the slightest idea what tomorrow will bring. The last couple of days have been a roller coaster of turns for the better and then the worse. I need to start from the beginning (as today reckons it) and go …
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I'm writing this after taking a nap on the 30th of September. Mom asked me to go home and get some rest because I was nodding off in my chair when visiting her, and it seemed prudent to do so.
When I got to the hospital yesterday it was just in time for her to get prepped for another round of paracentesis. The night before they'd drained about six liters of fluid from her abdomen, and by the time I actually saw her yesterday they had drained another three liters. This might explain the difficulty breathing. The surgeons also installed …
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Yinz might want to block the tag "cancer" in my posts henceforth. I'll figure out later how to get Switchboard to add hashtags to my posts.
I really can't think of any other titles for these posts, so to hell with it. It's descriptive and the best I can come up with. And I'm probably going to ramble. Sorry.
Mom didn't have a very good night last night - between the pain in her abdomen creeping up to 6/10 again and her O2 dropping, when I came in this afternoon she wasn't looking very good. In addition to supplemental oxygen …
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