I have erased the first sentence of this entry 6 times. It is so very cliche, but usually words just spill out when I sit down to write (actually, words seem to spill out of me most of the time – - I’m fairly chatty). Now I sit, staring at a computer screen with everything in the world to say, and no way to get it out. I’ve spent the last month trying to figure out the proper tone, the right level of detail, the most effective phrases (haven’t come up with one) to convey what’s happened since I last wrote. What I’ve finally decided is that how I write this is less important than that I write it. In fact, until this is written I don’t think I’ll be able to take back up where I left off and write anything else.
So to pick up where I left off….
My dad did eventually get better for awhile. When I was in Kansas in September he was suffering from an infection in 2 of hisvertebrae (for the medically inclined amongst you – osteomyelitis in T12 and L1). He spent time at the hospital, at a rehab facility, back in the hospital, at home, and back at the hospital before finally going home in mid-November. There are obviously lots of details being left out here, but I find I don’t want to cover them again. It was exhausting enough the first time around. If you’re interested in such things, you can get a blow-by-blow account by reading the blog we maintained for our extended family during dad’s illness at http://daveupdate.blogspot.com/. I’ll sum it up here by saying that he came home in time for Thanksgiving. He was cranky, and sore, but on the road to recovery. The infection was on the run and his kidneys fully functional again (oh yeah, they failed in early Nov.).
And when I say he came “home” I mean to his home. The one that I said they were moving out of the last time I posted. During the time dad was in the hospital his buyer backed out of the deal. Usually not a huge problem, but here was the glitch – my parents have a 3 story, 3 bedroom, 3.5 bath HUGE house. They were set to move into a teeny, tiny one bedroom house. In preparation we had a huge estate sale at which we sold just about everything. Anything that was left we packed up and put into a storage pod to await the move. Oops! Luckily they had bought furniture for the new house, so we were at least able to furnish the main level of their old house.
By early December dad was mobile enough to look after himself and we hired someone to come to the house several times a week to clean and cook and help look after Mom. My mom has Pick’s disease, which is a type of early-onset dementia, so the help was very, well…helpful. At this point I had been in Kansas for longer than I had lived in Japan. Rick visited for Thanksgiving, but I missed him and it was time to go home.
In February Megan called. Dad was back in the hospital. It appeared the 2 vertebrae that had been infected were weakened enough that they had collapsed. He was in considerable amounts of pain and drugged to the point that he couldn’t really talk. I made tentative plans to fly home. Feb. 4 – a new xray showed shadows on dad’s lungs. The doctors won’t say for sure, but they think it could be cancer. Feb. 5 – I jumped on a plane and flew home. Feb. 6 we’re told that dad does indeed have metastatic cancer. He’s so weak and has lost so much weight over the last 6 months that he will not survive treatment. Feb. 7 we bring dad home for hospice. Feb. 8 he passed away with mom and megan and me holding his hands. Yes, I recognize there were 3 of us and only 2 hands, but somehow we made it work.
And now, life moves on. It’s different, but it keeps moving.
