I brought Dad home 3 days ago, after being hospitalized for a solid month (exactly Oct 8 to Nov 8th) for his botched up infected leaking PEG. It's still "Event" spilling about the sides. I can handle dumping his spit, giving him meds, blood puke piss...What I can't handle is packing gauze into his PEG site. I do it but I just freak to poke it in him. I doubt he will be home long-will probably take him to Mayo. He has visiting nurses but it's always a new person, with a new theory and a personal way of doing things.
His last Radiation was thursday. They wheeled him out and he was carrying the mask and I started bawling uncontrollably. I have the mask it's the most powerful object I have ever been near.
We buried my uncle yesterday, and a close friend's daughter was found dead in a bathtub in Mexico the other day-we bury her on tues.
I started smoking again-makes perfect sense, right?
We should be focused on recovery but it doesn't seem like healing with all these tube issues. I forget about cancer entirely. Cancer has been the abstract-"treatment practice" the reality.
Dad and I have become so close. He never was a talker and now he writes more words than he ever spoke. There is a coffee shop in the hospital right next to the radiation clinic. 35 times he went by it but wrote on the last time on his way out the door how good it smelled. "Does it cause pleasure or discomfort to smell the coffee?" I asked him. "Pleasure" he writes...This is my Dad has not once complained though he hasn't swallowed even water in over 30 days.
I'm sorry that I don't contribute to others on this site...Every step of this journey has been baffling-I can't give advice because it has all gone wrong. I dust myself off, I try to give him confidence and then it goes wronger..then wrongy..then wrongery then good news but slightly wrong, then everything we have done is wrong, poor thing-go home take a bath and have a plate of wrong.
I thought I could fight this with enough knowledge, or the right attitude, or determination. I am cracking. I am angry.