“A cat?? What do you mean you think your dad is a cat?” you question. Well…….. they claim that a cat has nine lives and I’m mentally adding up the times my dear dad has potentally meandered close to ‘the light’ and managed to chuck a ‘u-ey’ and surprise us all.
Let us start the count with the five way heart bypass he required in 1998. Things were pretty grim. Freshly retired from years in the butcher shop, he was well on his way to a massive heart attack as one of his arteries was almost completely blocked and the others were rather compromised. And all the time he was wondering why he was struggling for a decent breath on his daily walk up to the local shops. He wasn’t even 60 years old.
That got him up and moving for a few years until 2004 when things weren’t hunky dory and an angiogram showed he needed a couple of stents placed in arteries. Apparently two weren’t enough and he was back in surgery again within a fortnight getting another one put in.
We thought things had settled for a bit until the summer of 04/05 and there was that pimple on his back that just wouldn’t pop. You guessed it….. that was no pimple. It was a skin cancer. A melanoma. The surgeon took a nice big chunk out of his upper back for this one because you’ve not only got to remove the cancer but leave a clean margin around the site due to those rogue cancer cells that like to travel around the body.
Of course, once you’ve had one cancer, you can be pretty certain that there are going to be more and dad has not been the exception to this rule. Three more melanomas removed in ten years and then the next big one…..the Squamous Cell Carconoma. That little beauty required another surgery followed up with a gruelling post-operative round of radiation. This treatment really knocked him around. The radiation treatment burned his skin terribly. It took away his ability to taste and smell and it was like it cooked his throat from inside as well. He couldn’t swallow from the pain and lost a lot of weight. Dad was incredibly sick from the treatment that was meant to save him and I was worried that he was going to throw in the towel. He didn’t.
Roll on to 2019 and I had planned a big adventure to the UK and Europe. Eight wonderful weeks off work wandering and exploring foreign lands with my camera. Dad clearly didn’t want me to go because he got pneumonia in April and because he was still struggling with his breathing in June they did a lung biopsy that showed he had lung cancer. Dad underwent more radiation treatments but by early August had proceeded to get so sick he was hospitalised. His condition deteriorated so severly we were all called into the hospital for the ‘family meeting’. When I tell you things were dire, I’m not exaggerating. I cancelled the initial four week UK section of my holiday and my brother rushed back from his 50th birthday trip. The doctors rolled the dice on one more procedure, a bronchoscopy, and somehow dad lived to fight another day. I’m not kidding either when I suggest that the bronchoscopy was a roll of the dice. If the procedure didn’t work we were organising dad’s funeral. Honestly, the marvels of modern medicine. Dad was as good as dead heading into surgery and within hours he was back. I don’t exactly know what they did when they were in his lungs, but it worked.
As things turned out, dad was out of hospital in good time and I still managed to get my trip to Europe whilst holding dad’s beloved watch hostage. If he ever wanted to see his watch again he had to stay alive until I got back from my holiday.
We’ve had some breathing room. There was/is another Squamous Cell carcinoma up near his left eye. More surgery, another skin graft, more radiation, more immunotherapy…..
Dad has been soldioring on, but two weeks ago…..
A call for an ambulance in the wee hours of the morning and Dad is back in hospital. Struggling to breathe, it turns out that this time he has clots on his lungs, making breathing difficult, straining his heart and causing fluid to build up around the heart further adding even more strain on his heart. Oh….and apparently he’d had a heart attack a couple of days earlier but he’d been too sick to notice it. Just awesome.
The doctors couldn’t do anything until they stabilised him and worked on disolving the clots. Another angiogram to see what’s going on and he’s got a blocked artery but the blockage is in a tricky position. (Of course it is!!) We had to wait a couple of days but the surgeon put a new stent in him and two days later he was back home, better than he has been for months.
See what I mean! Cat – nine lives. Dad – ???? but clearly more than one.