This is the first post of summer. It's long, so buckle in.
I have never been one to travel. As I have said before, most of my traveling is done from my coffee pot to my front porch. We usually take a yearly trip to see Jay's dad in Pawhuska, but that's usually about it. I did go on a cruise to Mexico once, but that was in my early twenties, and the details on that are pretty fuzzy.
Last summer, however, I did get to go on a trip of a lifetime. Not my lifetime. Dad's.
In early May, Dad was still going to the oncology center for chemo every couple of weeks for palliative doses. We wasn't investing in a cure. He was buying time.
Dad had been told repeatedly by others that he didn't need to stay in Wichita Falls for treatment. They insisted that he needed to go to Dallas for treatment, that that's where the experts are. To appease the armchair doctors, he did go once, where they told him that his doctors in Wichita Falls were treating his cancer in exactly the same was as what they would be.
I have to make a short PSA here concerning treatment. If you've somehow stumbled upon this blog because someone you know has lung cancer, I hope you take this piece of advice to heart: Let the person with the cancer take control of their life. It's their life. Not yours. It will be difficult because sometimes they won't make the choices that you want them to, and that's okay. Again, it's their life, not yours. Now that we've cleared that up, please proceed.
Dad normally would text us after an appointment with his doctor after they had reviewed his tumor markers. I think in sending a text rather than calling, this kept him in control of the emotions he had.
It was after his May 3rd appointment that I received a text that his tumor markers travelled to over 9,000. Dad had never had tumor markers that high before. Ever. A PET scan was scheduled, which only told us what we already knew. His doctors here, as with anywhere else, had to make the impossible decision to tell Dad that there was absolutely nothing else that they could do for him. They apologized. They cried. They told him goodbye.
They might have been done, but Dad wasn't.
Dad was a thinker, a planner, a problem solver. To him, cancer was just another job to do. A job that, no matter how hard it seemed, must have a solution. Dad called the Cancer Center Treatments of America, tangled with the insurance company, and got an appointment. I say tangled because, even though Tulsa is closer, insurance would only approve of him traveling to Phoenix, Arizona. One is a three hour road trip, the other is an airplane flight. Makes total sense, right?
Dad's appointment was scheduled for the end of May, and he and mom prepared for their trip. Dad had only flown twice: once in 1975 for a high school senior trip, and he didn't necessarily look back on that moment with fondness, and one other time to go pick up a fire truck.
This trip would prove most difficult as mom developed a blood clot in one of her legs and was still struggling with the after-effects of Chronic Lithium Toxicity. That is a whole other topic worthy of its own post. She was in such bad shape that there were doctors and nurses asking my mom what kind of cancer she had. They all assumed that she was the patient. This trip was incredibly hard on all of us as none of us every really left home for long periods of time. It genuinely felt like we would never see either one of them again.
They returned June 1st, just in time to surprise me at a birthday party Jay planned. As soon as they walked in, I had what I can only describe as probably the same feeling I'll have when I see him again in Heaven. It was a moment of shock and utter disbelief that I was actually seeing them again.
Dad helped mom to the table, and he sat quietly the way he always did. This was the last birthday party for me that he would ever attend.
Over the next week, Dad described the labs and tests and questions that they asked, he explained that he would have to go back in July for them to do a liver biopsy to see if we were still contending with lung cancer or if he had developed a secondary liver cancer. Mom was still in no shape to travel, so it was decided that I would travel with him as a caregiver.
Over the next few weeks, we joked about my anxiety because I had never been on an airplane before.
When the day finally came, I wanted to vomit. Yes, I was petrified of flying, but I was even more scared of knowing that I would likely hear what I already knew deep down: this was it.
We sat in the airport people-watching and Dad gave me varied bits of advice concerning take offs and landings. I did my best to at least appear to be brave. We boarded, took off, and I was immediately transformed into a toddler who had just tasted his first ice cream. It was incredible seeing the clouds just meters away from my window, and I wondered if Dad was smiling at the back of my head in elation that I was getting to experience this first with him.
We landed in a blistering hot Arizona, speed walked through the airport, and hopped onto a shuttle to our hotel. We called and checked in with Jay, mom, and the kids, and abruptly went to bed.
A detail that I've left out that's crucial here is that, for the last couple of months, Dad had been steadily gaining weight in his abdomen. He would subconsciously grab at his side, then dismiss our concern when we asked. I mention this now because the hotel had put us in a room with one queen-sized bed. I went to bed in fear that night because I was petrified that I would accidentally kick him in my sleep.
We awoke early the next morning, and checked in at CTCA. We would have pre-op, then return the next day for the biopsy. The biopsy wouldn't take long, he would spend a couple of hours in recovery, then we could head back to the hotel, then the next day we could go home.
We met with two or three doctors and a nutritionist. When his main doctor came in, Dad matter-of-factly asked, "What are my numbers?"
She said, "You mean your tumor markers? Let's see." in a most confident voice.
A few clicks from her keyboard, and her voice changed into a near whisper. She said, "Well, I show here that your numbers were 19,000 when we did your initial labs."
I looked from her to Dad, who was looking at me. We then simultaneously looked down at the ground. We both knew what it meant. We never discussed it with each other, and we didn't breathe a word of it to each other ever again.
We left that afternoon, suffered through a dinner at Cracker Barrel, then returned to the hotel. Dad laid down for a nap, and I walked across a Sahara of a parking lot to a Starbucks and a Target. In my anxiety of just thinking about packing and flying, I managed to leave my bag of undergarments at home. It would have been one thing to leave them and be sleeping in a room alone, but there was no way that I was going to sleep commando while sharing a room with my Dad.
When I returned, Dad was awake and had been looking for me. He smiled when I explained why I had gone to Target,
The next day, we returned for the biopsy. When they finally called me back to recovery, Dad had already talked one of the nurses into bringing two chocolate donuts, one for each of us. I watched the monitors rise and fall and spit out paper banners of heart rhythms into a trashcan. When Dad wasn't looking, I took pieces of the banners and folded them up into my purse.
A couple of hours later, and we were headed back to the hotel for another nap. Dad tossed and turned and moaned out of pain for the rest of the evening. Because of the amount of pain that he was in, we had to go back to CTCA to do a sonogram to make sure that he wasn't bleeding internally from the biopsy. He wasn't bleeding anywhere that they could tell, he completed a round of chemo, then we hustled back to the airport just in time to board.
The flight back was quick, and when we made it home, we pretended like we'd just been on a business trip. We talked about his appointments in a sterile, non-emotional way the way you'd discuss the weather forecast. We didn't share our secret of the tumor markers.
When I look back at this string of moments, I think it's here that I began to separate my emotions as a daughter who was losing her dad to my duty as a daughter helping to take care of her dad.
In those moments and many others to come, I had to put on a brave face, to be the one to dissect all of the information in an impartial manner and dispense it in a way that others could understand. This is the caretaker's burden. Your time to process, to cry, and grieve will come much later than anyone else's.
When I look back on that trip, even in spite of the bad news, I still smile.
I smile thinking about getting scanned at airport security my very first flight.
I smile thinking about the forgotten underwear.
I smile thinking about Dad looking at me as I sat in awe of puffy clouds passing outside of my window.
I smile knowing that those were the last few moments that I would get alone with my Dad before he left.
