2 years of nonstop anticipatory grief…
My dad was diagnosed with a rare cancer 13 years ago (a result of him being part of the recovery and cleanup after 9/11). January 2025, he seemed to start having more issues. More breathing trouble, lungs filling with fluid. It got to the point that by mid July, I was sure he wasn’t going to last the rest of the year. They ended up switching his chemo in August and things started getting better. He wasn’t having any pain from his tumors and his scans showed that the disease stopped progressing.
Fast forward to this year. He started having side effects from an osteoporosis infusion treatment that he had been getting and needed to have a procedure done. It was a non-invasive procedure but his oncologist refused to allow him to go through with it while he was on the chemo. So he took him off the chemo a week leading up to the procedure and then planned to put him back on 2 weeks after. All hell broke loose. He got the procedure and was fine. A week later, he ended up in the hospital with pneumonia and increasing difficulty with breathing. He was in and out of the hospital multiple times for 3 weeks.
This past Monday, he ended up back in the hospital and his decline has been quick. Even on oxygen, he can’t breathe well because he now has SVC syndrome. He’s too weak and frail for them to attempt any sort of treatment other than to hope the chemo creates a miracle. He’s fighting so hard to stay alive but seeing him waste away is torturous. There isn’t a second of every day that has gone by where I’m not worrying that this is it and trying to prepare myself for him to be gone. I know he doesn’t want to go, which makes me feel even worse. He’s only 67 and he doesn’t deserve to suffer this much. I feel completely consumed by grief and I don’t know how I’m going to handle when it’s actually his time.
I’m sorry this is long. My mind is so jumbled and full of fear that I don’t know how to say these things out loud without feeling like I’m going to vomit.