A Roll of the Dice

I’m amazed at how much science can tell us, and yet, in this time of modern marvels, how little they know. That’s the first thing that cancer taught me.

This is what treatment we think will work, but we are not sure if it will work with you or if your cancer will respond. We are seeing good results in trails with this, but we don’t know if it’s going to work for you. Side effects? They say these side effects are possible and you could experience all of them, some of them, none of them, or a completely different set of side effects. Survival? Life expectancy? Everyone is different and every cancer acts differently. We know but we don’t really know. Nothing but a grey area. A roll of the dice. 

 One thing that they were sure of was that my father had a large tumor on his pancreas and a few small tumors on his liver. The official diagnosis was Stage IV Pancreatic cancer.  Another thing they were sure of? The outcome was bleak. People don’t beat pancreatic cancer. All they can do is to prolong life for as long as possible. Even that outcome was pretty grim. Only a very small percent of people are a live 5 years after diagnosis. As in, less than 5% of people. It’s the nature of the type of cancer that he has. It’s quick, it’s deadly and there isn’t much they can do.

My parents met with the Oncologist at the Iowa Cancer Center. My dad was hopeful about treatment. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet and neither were we. They determined that a strong and aggressive chemotherapy regimen would give us the most time. There was an experimental therapy that was just getting FDA approval that had promising results. Not curative results, but it will give us some more time.

In the middle of May, he had a port put in and started his grueling therapy schedule of 48 hours of a chemotherapy cocktail every two weeks. He would start on Wednesday after noon and be hooked up to the IV until Friday afternoon.

My family spent our summer living in two week cycles. The weekend after the treatment was always a little rough with side effects. So plans were always made for the week following. In the beginning, we had some good weeks. There was even one week were I was even able to forget that he was sick for a day or two. Every once in a while, he would have a little bit of his energy back, he would eat a good meal or two, and he would have his sense of humor back. We hoped for more of those.

Unfortunately, good days and weeks were few and far between and the further down treatment road we traveled, the fewer good days we saw. His appetite failed. Cancer changes how your taste buds work and nothing sounded good and everything tasted terrible. A few times, we could get him to eat some his favorite foods like fried chicken. I can’t help but to laugh at the irony of the situation. Before he was diagnosed, my sister and I pleaded with him to cut back on fried chicken. He had high cholesterol and a family history of heart problems. The fried chicken was going to kill him after all! Flash forward to a couple months later and there we were buying fried chicken weekly in hopes that we could get him to eat it. He was in a lot of pain. The chemo made him nauseous.  He was weak. Small things took more energy than he had most of the time.

Sometime in August (maybe, time has kind of run together at this point) he went in for a scan to see how well/if the chemo was working. It was, a little bit. A teeny, tiny bit. The tumors were slightly smaller on the liver but there had been no change of the one on the pancreas.  The team of doctors decided to add a round of radiation therapy to his treatment plan. They wanted to try to shrink the tumor on the pancreas to ease his pain. They scheduled him to do 21 treatments, one every day while taking the weekends off.

It didn’t take long for things to go south after the radiation treatment started. It was brutal for him. Good days became non-existent. No energy, no appetite, constant pain, miserable. Just as he was finishing radiation, my parents came to an understanding that treatment was just too much. There wasn’t enough progress to justify the toll it was taking on his body. After talking to his doctors, they determined that they were going to stop any treatments and start Hospice care.

That brings us to today.

Little after six months after this journey began, we transported my dad from home to the Hospice House in Johnston.

My heart is heavy knowing that he’ll never walk through those doors again. I’ll never hear his laugh from down the hall. We’ll never eat dinner at the kitchen table together again. That house won't ever quite be the same. Something will always be missing.