A quiet moment…

It’s the end of a tough week here. The cancer situation continues to impact our lives in ways we’d never imagined.

Lisa’s spending increasing amounts of time in Belfast looking after her mother. It’s a life of shopping, doctor and hospital appointments and tending to her mother at home. She fits in work when she can, but it’s difficult for her. And, as I know, when you’re embroiled in a situation where a parent has cancer, your taste for other things in life tends to dry up. You become absorbed in the crisis.

I’ve effectively become a full-time house husband – which has its up- and down-sides. Mostly downsides, to be honest. I spent a full eight hours on Friday cooking, cleaning, washing clothers and dishes and preparing the house for guests who were staying over. I should be working too, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a window of time in which to get anything productive done.

To cap it all off (moan, moan), I’ve got this weird insomnia thing going on at the moment. I go to bed, then my arms and legs get restless and I end up bouncing around the bed trying to get comfortable. A couple of nights this week, I’ve ended up going downstairs and watching TV until the sensation fades and I drop off. Usually around 4:30am.

The house-husband role is a bit of a daunting task. But it’s becoming necessary. We’ve no idea how long this situation is going to continue for, and we need to set up some kind of routine for the kids. They’re feeling Lisa’s absence, and they’re becoming difficult as a result. Especially the older two – 8 and 6 respectively – are not responding well to coming home and finding mum missing.

As this looks like an increasingly long-term thing for us, I need to step up and stabilise the house. That means thinking about meal plans for the week. Knowing what’s coming up for the kids – appointments, various classes, what homework needs done each night. I need to keep the washing of clothes and dishes running smoothly – we’ve never been good at those. And of course the house needs to be kept clean. But the worst part of the last couple of months is our diet has become abysmal. We’re eating crap daily because the mealtimes aren’t being planned.

On the dinner front, I’m thinking about meals that we can make batches of – chilli, stew, things like that. These’ll get us started while we refine the menu and learn how to make healthier and tastier meals. Any ideas? Tell me in the comments!

(p.s. I know this sounds like a ‘me me me’ post, but I can’t really speak for what Lisa’s going through. I do think it’s important to mention the knock-on effects though, which is why I’ve written this post from my own point of view.)

Daniel and the wrist-slashing incident

Right, let’s talk about the night of 1st July 2009 and the bloody, wrist-slashing adventure that ensued.

We’d only buried my father at the weekend, and with that rather large event behind us, there was suddenly a metric ton of paperwork to take care of. Notifying all the various companies he had accounts with, getting utility bills transferred into The Mother’s name and dealing with a few legal matters. Not to mention the insurance claim for their disastrous trip to Lourdes.

Since it was the school holiday, we took the entire brood down to the parental home - hers now, not theirs – with the intention that the kids could play with their cousins while we sifted through his paperwork and got everything in order.

We arrived in the evening, too late to get started, and the kids went nuts. Stick six kids in a small house and watch as they race around dangerously. Repeated nagging – as always – failed to have any impact, but we kept nagging anyway. I was in the back garden talking to the brother-in-law when we heard a tinkle from inside. Unusually, this wasn’t followed by the sound of screaming or ‘angry parent discovering broken ornament’ noises.

Despite the lack of activity, I wandered inside to see Daniel sitting on the floor in the hallway. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t place it. Noticing a change in the light was the first clue that one of the glass panes in the door was smashed. Lisa came running past me, realising that he’d punched through the glass. She discovered a grotesque, deep gash in his wrist and he was starting to bleed heavily.

She screamed at me to get a towel as she cradled him on the floor, and I admit, it took a minute for me to react. Once she had the towel, I had the phone in my hand talking to the 999 service. I can’t even remember dialling – if it was me or someone else.

That was the point pragmatism kicked in, and I explained calmly to the operator what had happened, where we were and that we needed assistance. They ordered a paramedic and stayed on the line until the guy arrived. Lisa continued to apply pressure to the wound – possibly a side-effect of watching too many medical dramas, but it worked out well in the end. Anyway, the paramedic came in and dressed the wound and took him and Lisa out to the nearest Accident & Emergency in a town 30 minutes away. I followed in our car.

I remember just before jumping in the car, my mother and sister both looking at me dubiously. “You can’t handle the sight of blood, are you sure you’re alright to drive?” they asked, noting that I’d already gone deathly pale. I don’t know what propelled me, but I followed the medic and was arriving at the hospital at the same time Lisa and Daniel were. Some speed limits might have been broken in the process.

Whatever adrenaline we’d mustered during his initial wrist-slashing drained away quickly after a few hours waiting in the A&E department. We all felt knackered. And to cap it all, it was the same A&E that my father had been brought to when he collapsed at home and before he was admitted to cancer ward. I even recognized the same staff from that night, and so soon after the funeral, found it hard to cope with. These people wandering around doing their jobs probably didn’t remember the man brought in with breathing difficulties and his worried family. And seeing that place again brought it home how quickly everything changed.

Anyway, that plus the tiredness plus the jagged wound plus the not having eaten anything were slowly taking their toll. Eventually, one of the doctors came in and started trying to remove the dressing from Dan’s wrist. Blood had dried to it and he screamed in a mixture of pain and fear. We tried to distract him while she tried to get to the wound, but eventually she gave up in frustration and called some colleagues in to help.

I took a back seat at that point, but suddenly started feeling dizzy. Yep, that was the colour draining out of my face. This had happened before, and I knew what was about to happen. I muttered to Lisa that I was feeling faint, and she pushed me into that old head-between-the-legs position. Oh, but it was too late for that. I propped my head on my arm on the side of a desk and slowly, gracelessly, slid to the ground as the world literally disappeared and everything went black. The last thing I remember is Dan watching me as my face slid past his on the way to the floor.

The drama queen in me must’ve surfaced, because I remember hearing myself muttering that I couldn’t take this anymore and blah blah blah. shamefacedly, I decided to go and wait in the car while Daniel’s wrist was X-Rayed.

The Update

As you might imagine, this post was written months ago. I wanted to record the event, but forgot to post it.

Daniel’s wrist eventually healed. We were worried that he would have problems using his hand as a result of severed tendons, but by doing the exercises that we’d been given at the hospital, he has recovered.

He still has a horrendous, ugly scar running across his wrist, and he’ll probably always have to explain what happened when people notice his wrist and ask. On the other hand, he’s become much more cautious about touching windows and doors – which is not a bad thing considering.

Cancer everywhere

Let’s come straight out and say it: Lisa’s mother has been diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer. The events that led up to this have been unfolding over the past month, and a fairly concrete diagnosis came something over a week or a fortnight ago.

Lisa, naturally, was devastated. She didn’t help herself much by doing some web research into the survival rates and details of the disease. Seems Ovarian Cancer is dubbed the ‘silent killer’…

I can only speak for myself here, of course, but the notion of Lisa and I losing one parent each over the last year was hellish. And having come out one end of a cycle of hospitals, funerals and family complications, the thought of another? I just felt numb, to be honest.

The aftermath of my own father dying hasn’t been a pretty picture. My mother and younger sister are drowining in guilt and grief. My other sister did some fairly horrible things too, including stealing money and documents when we were sorting out the will. And as I devoted myself to my father during his hospital stay, our business suffered.

It’s funny that the tables are turned this time though. I’ve tried to be as useful as possible around the house while Lisa has made herself available to her mother for moral support and more. I think we both understand that it has to be this way.

Luckily, the latest consult seems to suggest that Lisa’s mother detected this cancer really early. Each subsequent consult with a new doctor seems to downplay the extent of the spread. It may be a reasonably straightforward operation followed by some chemotherapy. In other words, no-one’s suggesting this is a terminal case.

How to describe the prospect of another cancer fight? Enormously unsettling. I’ve seen first hand the damage that bereavement did to our family – to the point where I barely want to speak to my mother on the phone. People don’t react in a predictable fashion when they’re scared and/or grieving: some bury their heads, others want to be left alone, others try to turn it into their drama.

Hopefully what’s going on with my mother-in-law will work out well. Strangely, when my father died, my in-laws seemed more attuned to the fact that I was suffering than my own family. It’s horrible to see them going through this so soon after my dad.

Deathbed scenes and false alarms

To say that the last few weeks have been stressful would be pushing the art of the euphemism to its absolute limits.

My father’s condition has deteriorated (he has cancer) since his second round of chemotherapy. Suddenly, I’ve been dealing with some overwhelming emotions – intense grief and a sadness that I’ve never felt before. As the prospect of him dying becomes ever more real, feelings and memories have been jumping out at me, helping to crystallize my father’s role in my life.

My nickname for my father for years has been Chib. In the last week, he’s come close to dying a couple of times. He’s even managed to fool the hospital staff, but would inevitably recover overnight as we all sat close by.

It suddenly became important to me to tell Chib how I felt about him before he died. After the first scare, I thought I’d missed my opportunity, so on the second scare, I wanted to make sure that I had a heart to heart with him. I got a text message during Rachel’s dance show, and rushed to the hospital before I even had a chance to see her perform.

After a frantic dash from Lisburn to Belfast, I arrived at the hospital and ran to the ward, whizzing past uncles and aunts who were clearly assembling as well. The room was packed with relatives, and I glanced at Chib lying on the bed looking failed with his breathing shallow. Before I could stop myself, tears were streaming down my eyes and I thought I’d missed my chance. I might have spoken there in front of everyone, but one of the aunts in the room realized that I wanted some time alone and kindly took everyone else out (except my mother).

The words came tumbling out of my mouth in what was probably a frantic stream: reminiscences of things we’d done together, gratitude for always being there for me, and that above all else, I loved him and would sorely miss him. When you suddenly start to sum up the life of a loved one, you realize how important they’ve been to you. And although we rarely (read: never) shared our feelings openly, it became important to me to share this with him before the end, before he became incapable of understanding the words…

In the end, it turned out to be a false alarm. He lasted out the night, and seemed to be recovering from the low ebb.

Though my father continued for another couple of days, I felt oddly at peace after my deathbed chat. Whether he heard me or not (the nurses say that hearing is the last thing to go), I felt that it was important to thank him before the end. Even if my regular presence at his bedside wasn’t a clue to my feelings, I hope that the words helped.

(Apologies for the change from present tense to past tense – I wrote this before my father died and finished it today).

An impending death in the family?

This could be quite a difficult post to write, because as I type this, my father is seriously ill in hospital. The outlook is not good for him.

All of this started almost three weeks ago. We had returned from a short trip to London and the very next morning got a phone call from a family member in my hometown. The shocking news: my father had been taken to hospital…in Lourdes. I raced across to France to help organise my parents’ return home, and heard the French doctors’ diagnosis that he appeared to have two have two tumors and two aneurysms.

We returned home on the 18 April and my father was taken straight to the local hospital, where he stayed for a few days. However, he was released because they couldn’t do the required tests straight away. He went back to hospital to have a tissue sample of the suspected tumor in his lung last Friday.

But by Saturday night, another phone call – he’d been rushed to hospital after collapsing in the house. He was having breathing difficulties and dizziness. I went straight to the hospital, and met my worried-faced family. While we were there, he started taking serious chest pains and was hoarsely crying out in agony. Word came from the doctors that he had some kind of chest infection which was affecting his breathing. But, boy did he look bad at the height of those pains.

Dealing with family stuff

Right now, I’m burned out on family stuff. As hard as it is to watch my father deteriorating, I’m trying to keep my mother focused on practical things (she’s not a clear thinker at the best of times), and not to become to maudlin, at least not right now.

The eldest of my two sisters is being insufferable though. I won’t go into the details of my dislike of her, but that dislike is deep-rooted and long-lived. She acts like a petulant, moody teenager (she’s 31) and sulks when all attention is not on her. Now, any normal person would respect the seriousness of the situation and put their own issues on the back burner. Not my sister. She’s storming out over trivial nonsense on a daily basis, just for the attention.

Coupled to that, there’s clearly a very negative mood in the family right now. Given our gene pool’s predisposition to cancer, and the vague diagnoses that we’ve had to date, it looks like my father may be heavily riddled with cancer. We don’t have confirmation of that, of course, but our collective Spidey-senses are tingling.

Anyway, there’s much noise right now: relatives enquiring after him, my mother and sisters talking about wills and possible funeral arrangements, a bit of antagonism about certain aunts trying to take control of the situation. Blah blah blah. I’m able to cope with the practical stuff extremely well, but family politics are quickly wearing me down and tiring me out.

My brood

There’s been a ton of disruption to my own family. I’m having to disappear back to my home town for a few days at a time. Lisa’s coping admirably, but she was shocked when she finally made a visit to the hospital. We took the kids along and they were pretty shocked. In fact, I’ve never seen them so well behaved and silent in a public place.

And my reaction?

I’m doing remarkably well when I’ve got something to keep my mind engaged – like making arrangements and making sure my mother remembers to eat. I was extremely businesslike in France, and likewise when we got him into hospital back home.

Right now though, I’m tired. And more emotionally drained than I can remember being at any other time in my life. For the most part, I’m coping well, although I find myself becoming teary whenever I think about after he dies. Who’s going to manage the wake? Who’s going to say a few words at the funeral? Will it be me? What will I say? I don’t know. I did have a brief break in my composure this evening. I couldn’t stop myself, it all just became so overwhelming.

On an intellectual level, this is testing all my beliefs about death and illness to the limit. My core belief on this is that death is the end. Once you die, it’s like turning off a television set for the last time. No picture, no sound. And I’ve read enough Buddhist literature to accept that death is inevitable and we must come to terms with that. And if I’m honest, my sadness is for the man who raised me going through such pain and rapid deterioration right now.

I think I can handle his death, when it happens. It’s just really upsetting to watch his physical pain and my mother’s mental distress – she’s floundering without him and I think what’s hitting her hard is how much she relies on him. Part of what I’m trying to do is to get her thinking about how she’ll manage her routine if something happens.