The Beginning of the End

Happier days.

Jeff was awake when I walked into his room, but he was very groggy.  He had an IV with a morphine drip for his pain and to keep him calm.  Keep him calm?  If he knew everything that I knew, he would be freaking out.  He was so medicated that he was not totally in touch with reality. That was a good thing.   He tried to tell me what was going on, but it was all mixed up.  I patted his face and said to him that I knew what was going on, which seemed to satisfy him.  He went to sleep.

I sat in a chair next to his bed.  Nurses were in and out.  They would wake him up to ask him questions, and then he would go back to sleep.  Nobody called his room to check on him, not his dad, his grandmother, or any of his friends at work.  It was just him and me.  It would be that way for most of his illness.

Sitting in that room in the dark next to him, the only thing I could do was think.  I had a multitude of thoughts scrambling around in my brain, none of them good.  I was doing a lot of self-talk, trying to convince myself that I could handle this.  Over and over, I kept telling myself that this wasn't fair; he was too young to be possibly terminally ill.  And that horrible "life isn't fair" would pop in my head.  It was making me mad.

I looked over at him, the big, muscular, healthy guy who never got sick, and I wanted to cry.  Now he was a young man with several IV bags running fluid through him; he had dark circles under his eyes, and he was snow white.  The only color he had was the blue veins showing beneath his translucent skin.

They brought his dinner in, a liquid diet of broth and light liquids.  He woke up and said he was nauseous and didn't want it.  I rang for the nurse to see if they could give him anything for nausea, and they put it in his IV.  This would be the beginning of a ritual for the next 3 and a half months.  Nausea and not eating and pain would rule his life.  I was going to learn a lot about cancer patients in the next few months.

I stayed with Jeff that night until he received his last morphine drip in the IV.  I told him that I would leave when I knew he was comfortable and settled in for the night.  I left when he was soundly asleep.

I wasn't able to sleep much that night.  That would be my pattern for the next few months.  I would toss and turn, get up, walk around, smoke, look out the back door and try not to think about the next morning.  I was dreading the next day.  I had no support system, nobody with a kind shoulder to lean on.  It would have helped me.  I knew that I was a pretty tough cookie overall, but wasn't sure if I could handle my son's illness by myself.  Based on what the doctor had already told me, I was pretty sure that the prognosis was not going to be good.  I was so stressed out that I couldn't think clearly.  Normally, I would have been going over contingency plans in my head, the "just in case" ideas.  Not now, I had hit a brick wall.  I kept seeing Jeff lying in the hospital bed, pale and helpless.  I couldn't get it out of my head.

I got ready to leave for the hospital early in the morning.  Jeff called and left a message in a feeble voice to please bring him some cigarettes.  Of course,  I would; what harm would it do now?  At least when he recovered from the surgery, he could do that.  I stopped on the way to the hospital and picked up his cigs, and then I was on my way.

I got there so early that I was allowed to wheel Jeff downstairs, IV's and all, so he could smoke.  I would have done almost anything to keep him distracted and calm.  I was a mess emotionally but hid it as much as possible.  I vowed never to let him see me upset.  It was going to be hard.

I took him back to his room, and it was time to move to the pre-op area.  He was sedated and not talking much, but he was very aware of where he was and what was going on.  Right before they took him into surgery, they placed his chart on his bed.  He picked it up, and it fell open to X-rays of his colon.  We both looked.  I wish I hadn't.  The "thing" in his colon was huge.  I wanted to scream, but I didn't.  We just looked at each other.  I tried to maintain control, and somehow I did.  But poor, Jeff had a look of horror on his face.  I will never forget it.  Fortunately, his doctor appeared and closed the chart.  He said they had to take him to surgery.  I kissed him goodbye and told him I would be there when they brought him out.  His doctor looked at me with a sad look on his face, and he and a nurse rolled Jeff through the doors.

It was going to be a very long day.