*My father was sick with cancer for 23 months. My mom and I were his caretakers. Along the way I wrote what turned out to be 190,000 words-worth of journals. For context that’s about 750 pages. I am currently going through the collection of journals, all in one document now, unearthing what will be my memoir of Dad’s cancer told in the form of diary entries. (Possibly two volumes.) Below is one small section. I plan to post more of these over time. This particular entry section is from May 30, 2023. He died on June 2nd.
~
Holy shit. That’s the best way to say it. Or perhaps: Holy Fuck-Sticks.
So. Last night I got very close to no sleep. An hour or two, maybe. I was anxious, restless all night. I couldn’t settle down. I’d been reading Bill Bryson’s book Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, which was fairly successfully distracting me—as had my hike to the Lompoc water tower earlier with Britney—but I couldn’t escape this nagging sensation like something was wrong with my dad. Or would be wrong.
Just before my niece attempted suicide for the first time—late May, 2021—my mom had a very vivid dream with my niece in it wherein she said she was “drowning” and then ran into the sea and barely survived the pounding surf and a nasty riptide. Not long after that the on-purpose car crash happened.
Well, in a similar way, I had a “feeling.”
I’d fallen asleep deep in the early morning for maybe twenty, thirty minutes. When I casually checked my phone there was a text from Mom. It was 5:30am. The text said: “Michael, come as soon as you can; Dad refuses to wear his oxygen mask; he’s belligerent; he threw up blood everywhere.”
That got my attention. I sat bolt upright, adrenaline surging. What a way to wake up. I paraded into the living room, naked, and there was Britney on the couch, working before going to work officially, donning her pink robe. I told her what was going on. I gathered my wits for a moment. I quickly threw on jeans and a shirt and jacket and then called my mom.
Mom was half crying when she answered the phone, and she sounded highly agitated and disturbed. All she said was, with a sincere, deep quiver in her voice: “Michael, he’s been off oxygen for 90 minutes. He threw up blood all over the place. He wants to go. Come now.”
“Ok,” I said, and we hung up.
It took seven or eight minutes—Britney helped—to get my stuff together and then I raced out the door. I jumped in the Leaf and took off. I desperately needed caffeine so I stopped a mile away at the gas station and got a massive 32 ounce English Breakfast tea (I haven’t had coffee in over a decade). I jumped onto Highway 1 South, the by-now old familiar drive, passing the green rolling fields and hills with yellow mustard plant in the dense 55-degree fog.
I knew my father wouldn’t be alive when I got there. It’s a 50-minute drive. There was no way. His oxygen level must have been atrociously low; Mom had put him at the absolute maximum level of 10% assistance. We’d never gone that high. And he’d been off for 90 minutes. I sighed often and loudly as I drove, and this time, rare for me, I sped going over 80 in the fast lane. I imagined seeing my father’s corpse, mouth agape, eyes wide and marble-dead. I thought of my life post-Dad. At least there’d be no more discomfort or suffering for Dad. And we could all move on. Or start to. There was relief in that. But that relief was mixed with a stark hot fear and a surging need for him to be alive. I wasn’t ready yet. Or I was. But damn it: Not yet!
Ten minutes north of my folks’ I texted my mom and said I was close and asked for an update. The minutes ticked by as I raced south along Highway 101. I got off on Garden Street, drove many blocks north, took a right on Anapamu, and headed for the hills. At last I pulled onto my folks’ street. The garbage and recycling cans sat outside in the way of the driveway so I passed that and parked at the neighbors’ house across the street. I slammed the E-brake on and, leaving my stuff, I jumped out, yanked the brown iron gate open, huffed up the steep knobby stone steps, opened the second thick wooden side gate, and ran up the stone steps leading up along the side of the house.
When I got to the side room door I ripped it open.
Dad was alive. Somehow. He was flat on his back—which is terrible for him since it brings the fluids in his lungs up into his throat; in the past 23 months of his cancer journey I hadn’t seen him like this once—and at a weird angle. Blood was everywhere, on the light blue bed sheet, on the bed cover, on the pillow case, on his shirt, etc. Rags covered in blood sat down on the floor below the bed. Mom looked scared and feral. We didn’t even hug. We skipped formalities. The second I’d seen my father he said “Thank God.” (Later she told me he had wanted to die, having torn his oxygen mask off, but when my mom said “Don’t die before Michael gets here, he’ll be devastated,” Dad’s big blue eyes bloomed open and he started trying to fix the situation.)
She’d just managed minutes before I arrived to get his oxygen mask back on. I got him upright on the pillows again. He sounded awful: Really gurgly, his throat wet and phlegmy. He was agitated. Mom got ahold of the Hospice nurse and she was going to come between 11 and 11:30am. It was 7:30.
Once we got Dad situated and back on oxygen things calmed down for a while, but two hours later, around 9:30am, he started struggling to breathe again. At 10% assistance. It sounded like he was constantly clearing his throat. Gasping a little bit. Mom had told me at 3am he’d been the worst she’d seen; that he was gasping desperately for air. He’d pulled his mask off in the middle of the night and was angry and combative; he refused to put it back on. He said he was done. Mom said the sound was horrific. She thought for sure he was going to die. She’d almost called me but, for some reason, hadn’t. (She later said she worried about me driving at 3am along the dangerous dark roads of twisting Highway 1 and 101.)
This time, at 9:30, he was bad but not that bad. But he was making a lot of noise. He kept saying he was “ok” but clearly he wasn’t. He refused more Morphine. The fentanyl patch is on his stomach but it didn’t seem to be doing much. We hadn’t heard from the pharmacy yet about the aid-in-dying med. The doctor called in the prescription this morning; she said the pharmacy should call today. Nothing as yet, as of 4:53pm. Probably we’ll hear from them tomorrow. Anyway we decided to inject Morphine into his peg-tube. We did that and, slowly, he started to make less noise, and to be breathing easier, and to calm. Then he was asleep.
Mom told me the tale of the middle of the night: Dad had ripped his mask off saying he was finished with it all. She tried to put his mask back on and he warned her to “not touch me.” She said she’d never seen him that combative and belligerent. Another irony as Dad nears death: First seeing him blackout on drugs (Ativan) and then hearing about him being belligerent. It all reminds me of myself in my alcoholic twenties. Very different circumstances and reasons, obviously.
At 9:30 he also did this thing which was similar in many ways to the Ativan episode: His body twitched convulsively and he started sentences he didn’t finish, such as “For two years…” as well as said random names such as “Luke” (their yellow Lab), etc. Mom said he’d done the same thing at 3am. We figured: it must be him not getting enough oxygen to his brain; he’s mentally misfiring. That would also explain the anger and belligerence and the speaking and probably the convulsions. The throwing up blood is easy: The tumor is breaking all his organs down. Ditto the blood in his peg-tube port.
The Hospice nurse came around 11:30. She was very helpful. She helped get a clean sheet on the bed without Dad getting off the bed itself. (A nurse’s trick.) We replaced his T-shirt and pillow case and I put all the blood-drenched dirty stuff in the downstairs washing machine. The nurse reapplied a new peg-tube port bandage. We gave him some water and more Morphine. Since then he’s been sleeping on and off and calm/quiet. Tonight will be interesting. We may have to get up and check on him a few times each. We’ll dose him with Morphine but due to his oxygen issues we don’t trust him not to rip his mask off.
My sister is likely coming by for a final visit tomorrow before her trip with her son and some of his friends to Bass Lake. My niece is no longer coming. We seem pretty stable for now. Let’s hope to God the fucking Death Med arrives soon. Hopefully tomorrow. The pharmacy is probably catching up from Memorial Weekend. All Mom’s neighbors have been going on European and African adventures. I feel so far away from anything like that. I’m deeply jealous. But: We all have our time. There is a time and a place for everything, as they say.
Mom’s good friend brought us dinners for the next few nights. Britney called and I filled her in. The oxygen tank guy came and took away the old empty tanks.
Pray for that med.