My 64 year old, two month retiree father, was diagnosed with ES SCLC in mid December. Despite couple of ER visits and short hospital stays, he responded wonderfully to 3 rounds of traditional infusion chemo. Pnumonia has been a bugger since the beginning, and had mainly been the reason for the short hospital stays. A month ago, he did his last round of traditional chemo, and we were planning on having him start immunotherapy. He had a follow up with his oncologist on April 10th to plan out his immunotherapy, and was back in the hospital by April 19th, where he has been since. We have been between two hospitals, and he is currently in the ICU since Thursday. I don’t think my dad is coming home this time.
I am starting to mentally scramble, as my parents have absolutely nothing prepared for end of life, and have pretty much left it up to me. My mom is still living, and has been my dad main caretaker, but cannot handle the ‘administrative’ stuff. For context, I am a 32 year old female, the eldest of two, while my parents are both the youngest of their siblings; they have not been known to be a duo that thinks long term. The man didn’t even have health insurance when he was diagnosed, but I got that figured out. He turns 65 next month, so my automatic beef with Medicare starts soon as well.