I think my dad is part cat.

“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.

In the end it was all too much.

So ……….my sister died yesterday.

She was only 46 years old. Married for 25 years. Two grown children.

Too young really.

Ironically, it wasn’t the Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (stage 4) she was diagnosed with late last year that took her life. Nope. According to the scans she went through last week, there was no sign of cancer. She’d beaten that sucker. It was multiple organ failure.

You know when you’re about to undergo a tiny procedure and the doctor tell you all the things that could possibly go wrong but are a one in a million chance of occurring? My sister was that one in a million patient. If it was going to be an unusual reaction to a drug or treatment ……. she had it. The poor doctors and nurses at the Peter Mac have been left scratching their heads in bewilderment at what became an unending parade of unexpected and ultimately fatal complications.

Amber went into hospital nine weeks ago for what was supposed to be the final step in her cancer treatment. She never left.

It has been a long and terrible nine weeks for her husband and children. It has been a harrowing nine weeks for her parents, my mum and dad, who have been with her every day of this final journey. It has been a nightmarish nine weeks for my mum who spent weeks at the Peter Mac and the Royal Melbourne Hospitals last year as my dad faced, and survived, his own cancer battle only to be back there again watching her youngest child slowly fade away.

Like a cat with its nine lives, Amber had run out of lives. She suffered from severe Crohns disease that hospitalised her on a regular basis, was lucky to survive a brain aneurysm a few years ago, she had chronic migraines and she had to cope with seizures. I think that her body simply wasn’t strong enough to handle the horrors of chemotherapy on top of everything else.

And I think she’d had enough.

On Thursday afternoon her husband and my parents had to make the heartbreaking decision to discontinue treatment as Amber’s liver was failing, as were her kidneys. The only thing left was to keep her comfortable and wait. We’d run out of miracles.

Amber chose to leave us Sunday morning. Not Friday as that was her best friend’s birthday, and not today which is her daughter’s birthday. Her husband was with her as she took her final breath and the rest of us were there shortly thereafter to grieve and spend those last hours with her now that her struggle was over.

Amber pretty much missed the entire COVID-19 situation. I don’t think she was ever well enough in the last nine weeks to watch television, listen to the radio or read the newspaper. We told her about it as we sat with her on a visit, but it had no impact on her situation. She wasn’t going anywhere. It impacts her now as we decide how best to say farewell in the more formal sense of the word.

Goodbye sis. It’s a shame we never had a close sisterly bond. I can’t apologise for that, nor can I be filled with regret for it. We are/were two different people with two different paths to tread. But you are still my little sister and you’re not here anymore. And it hurts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plans change.

You’re probably wondering why I have a picture of the inside of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute (The Peter Mac) on a blog post titled “Plans change”. Let me tell you why…………

I had plans. BIG plans. Seven weeks overseas visiting Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Greece. I have had to adjust these plans a little bit.

According to Encyclopedia Google the quote “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” is the modern translation of “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” from Scottish poet Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse.” I always thought it was written by John Steinbeck, but he only pinched a teeny bit of it to use as the title of his famous novel ‘Of Mice and Men’.

Cancer will make you change your plans. My dad has cancer. Lung cancer. He was diagnosed about 2 months ago. This is not his first cancer. It started with the melanomas. Then there was the squamous cell carcinoma on the left side of his neck a few years ago. Every visit to the Peter Mac had the family on edge. What was going to be cut off today? What else had they found?

The relentlessness of a post-cruise bout of pneumonia led to the doctors taking a lung x-ray which revealed the cancerous tumour on the left lung and subsequent testing led to the discovery of the bonus little tumours on the right lung.

Last week things got life-threateningly scary for dad. We were at the pointy end of things and the point was pressing into him pretty hard.

Packing a suitcase and boarding a plane that was going to take me thousands of miles away from my dad and my mum was NOT an option. I knew where I had to be and on a plane to Dublin was not it.

So I changed my plans. A postponement. Nothing a few phone calls and emails couldn’t sort out.

Unbelievably my dad was discharged from the Peter Mac today, a week after we were gathered around his bedside trying to bring him comfort in what we honestly thought were going to be his last hours. The team at the Peter Mac had only one option available and they gambled on it. The gamble paid dividends. But I don’t think they took into account the stubborn nature of my dad. He wasn’t ready to go yet. You don’t fuck with my dad.

He had better keep this fighting spirit going. The new flight is booked for the 31st.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, that’s put a dampener on things.

Lump.

Tumour.

Cancer.

Words that strike fear into the hearts of most people.

Words you don’t want to hear.

Words that you hope you’ll never hear uttered in a sentence that relates to someone you care about. Somebody who is important in your life.

Words that I actually expected that I would hear.

Now our family is like so many others. Like too many others.

Those horrible words are going to become a big part of our vocabulary over the coming weeks, months, years.

They are now so much more than words.

Suddenly they are reality.