Hospice

I guess I haven't really made this information public, but I guess I had better before... ooh, what do I put here?... before it's too late? That seems so dramatic, and yet that's the fact of the matter. Death is dramatic, dying is not so much, or at least not usually. My husband is dying. I'm getting ahead of myself here though, so let me start at his last ER visit.

Several weeks ago Dean woke up in the middle of the night with a bleed from his tumor. To you it might just look like a bad bloody nose that just won't stop. He had had 5 bleeds in 6 weeks- one after every chemo treatment for the last three treatments. The first of these most recent bleeds (he had had two back in Nov and Jan) was bad: white as a sheet when he arrived at the ER, barely alive. This last one didn't start out so bad and I sent him to the hospital under the care of competent EMTs knowing he'd rally and telling him I'd come get him when he was ready to be discharged. And hour and half later, the ER doc called asking when I was coming in because my husband "could be dead in 10 minutes." Of course, I ran (and sped) to be by his side, and when I finally found my husband, to my dismay they had stuffed his nose again (they did this in January), but this time Dean is pretty sure they broke his nose from the inside while packing it. Dean had asked the ER doc to let him die, but as ERs are in the business of saving lives, that's what they did. I knew as soon as I saw Dean, he would have rather died than go through the (debatably unnecessary) packing of his nose again.

Before he went to the ER that morning, Dean had already made the decision to begin hospice care at home. We were going to start making calls that week. Thankfully, now the social worker at the hospital would set it all up. Now there was no question. There would be no more painful procedures for Dean.

Now there are even more difficult calls to make: funeral homes, cemetery. Meanwhile, hospice comes every week. And every week my husband's need for pain meds increases. His discomfort increases. When the nurse asks if we have any questions, I want to ask, "How much longer?" I'm afraid she will have no answer and that she will say "not long" and that she will say something that sounds like too long (I am so conflicted). Somehow I make it through these visits without crying, but inside of me I feel a part of me screaming, groaning, oh how I ache. I break afterwards.

And every night I go to sleep (or to work) with the possibility lingering in the back of my mind, "Will he bleed tonight?"

A little bit about shootings and cancer

I don't know how to talk to my kids about the risk that they may be murdered at school.

Talking to your kids about the fact that they could be murdered at school is just an awful thing to have to talk about, much like my having to talk to my kids about their dad's terminal diagnosis. There's no easy way about it. But the good news with the schools is that they are LIKELY to get out alive. So I tell my kids to go in prepared and brave. "You watch and you listen. And you tell me ANYTHING that strikes you as weird or disturbing." And if it so be that he or a friend gets called to be with our loved ones in Heaven, then that's something that we can be sad about at that time. But we don't live in fear of it and we don't mourn before it's time. We live life to the fullest while we have it.

We live the same way (or we try) with my husband's diagnosis, though most days he's too ill to live life fully, but we do what we can. But barring any miracles from Heaven, his shooter is coming. We don't know when, or how, just that the doctor has repeatedly assured us (because we just refuse to believe there's no other way out) that the cancer WILL EVENTUALLY take his life.

I have recently and repeatedly found great comfort in these words by Dallin H. Oaks:

"As children of God, knowing of His great love and His ultimate knowledge of what is best for our eternal welfare, we trust in Him. The first principle of the gospel is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and faith means trust. I felt that trust in a talk my cousin gave at the funeral of a teenage girl who had died of a serious illness. He spoke these words, which first astonished me and then edified me: 'I know it was the will of the Lord that she die. She had good medical care. She was given priesthood blessings. Her name was on the prayer roll in the temple. She was the subject of hundreds of prayers for her restoration to health. And I know that there is enough faith in this family that she would have been healed unless it was the will of the Lord to take her home at this time.' I felt that same trust in the words of the father of another choice girl whose life was taken by cancer in her teen years. He declared,' Our family’s faith is in Jesus Christ and is not dependent on outcomes.' Those teachings ring true to me. We do all that we can for the healing of a loved one, and then we trust in the Lord for the outcome." (https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/04/healing-the-sick?lang=eng)

We can't control the future... not that we shouldn't try to make things better, but fearing the worst does nothing to improve the future. Prepare for the worst, expect the best. It's what Dean has always helped me to do. Still holds true.