Genji’s Butler

(part 2 of 2)

It is impossible to put into words how difficult this is for me. I need to be here, but I also feel like he’s slipping away and I may not get the opportunity to see him – if he’s put in hospice care I’m not sure he’d be allowed to travel out here once Butterfly leaves the cocoon.

My mother tells me that he’s in no immediate danger and that maybe he’ll be allowed to come home once they have the pain under control.

I think that last phrase is the worst part for me- I was prepared to hear that he’d died of a stroke or a heart attack not that he’d linger for a year or two in pain towards the end as vital organs are consumed by the out of control machinery of biology that is cancer. I know that it’s hard for my mom to sit there and watch- when I talk to her on the phone sometimes I can hear the exhaustion and the suppressed anguish. At least, she has something that she can do- even if it is sit there and hold his hand, bulldog the hospital staff, and take him decent meals. From here, there is nothing that I can do except call him regularly and make sure that Mom doesn’t need anything that I can provide.

All of this tempers the joy that I feel when anticipating our little girl. In some ways, it’s good- when tasted, the bitter makes the sweet all that much sweeter- but I’m worried that sometimes it comes off to C as ambivalence.

(This is part 1 of a 2 )

So, it’s been about two weeks since I last bothered to update- and what weeks they’ve been.

The first part of them were spent getting ready to go back to Mo. for my brother S’s wedding. It was good to see him hitched. Pictures are on Facebook and all over the place, so I won’t bother to link them here. Besides, I’m too lazy to go hunt a good one down. I did some basic videography for the ceremony, but I haven’t really taken the time to process it with iMovie (I don’t have Final Cut). If there’s some demand, I’ll post the video here for others to view.

The real stress inducer for this week has, without a doubt been my dad’s failing health. When we were last back to visit in May, he was looking MUCH better, even though there were still some detectable tumors in in his lungs, his oncologist was confident that they wouldn’t really impact his quality of life and they were going to monitor them for a bit – rather than attempt another course of chemo, since the chemo that the cancer had responded too was rather old and more toxic than most.

So once the chemo had flushed itself from his system he started to feel better and my parents went about their lives; nervously, I think, but they got to go out and have some fun.

Well, about a month ago he started to feel worse again. This past trip, he looked worse to me than he had when we saw him after his first round of chemo. Finally, on the day we departed mom convinced him to go back to the hospital.

Which is where he is right now.

Apparently, the pain in his back, his inability to keep down foods, and extreme exhaustion is because his liver- quoting my mother here “looks like swiss cheese” with tumors. From my sister’s blog I got a piece of information that nobody had told me – they’ve categorized it as stage 4 liver cancer. Additionally the tumors in his lungs are now the size of dimes and they didn’t get an exact count- in may there were 14- I expect that number has gone up significantly.

Tomorrow morning he’s supposed to have a needle biopsy; It can take anywhere for 2 days to 2 weeks to get the specific sub-typing that would allow for chemo to begin.