What Day Is It?
Today I was giving someone a timeline of things that have happened since Christmas. I had to look at the calendar and I had no idea that it’s just been two weeks since we came home from the hospital. In some ways it has been frenetic and in some ways it has crept by. Time stands still at times and sometimes, I look away and it feels like two days have passed.
Pete has struggled with vertigo since after his liver resection the week of Thanksgiving. We always thought that it was related to his pneumonia and that that was caused by his being intubated for 10 hours for that surgery. It turns out that his one treatment of EnHER2, which targets the mutation he contracted after his colon resection, was the cause of his pneumonia.
At this point of the story, I want to acknowledge that a large part of a cancer battle is dealing with symptoms, side effects, and it can change daily. One of Pete’s nurses at North said to me once how he was admitted to the hospital for one thing and we were focused on something different the next day. I feel like that is a very accurate description of Pete’s cancer journey. Just when we got one thing figured out, something else would come up. We have so much respect for everyone in our health care journey. That will definitely take up another blog and still never give justice to how well we’ve been taken care of.
We were just managing symptoms before his ER visit on the 21st of December and were given the option for Pete to be admitted or take some heavy antibiotics and go home. At that time we chose to go home.
December 27th, we would end up back in the ER and choose to be admitted this time.
The first four days of his hospital stay were at North and ended up with 4 lesions being found in his brain, talks of quality of life and needing to speak with several professionals before deciding our path forward.
December 31st, he was transported to Central for a biopsy of his brain and meetings with experts in neurology and pneumology. We were delayed 2 days because of more pressing surgeries at the hospital.
January 4th, 2023: Since his biopsy had been completed, we asked to go home and were discharged 2 hours later.
Several days after the 4th, Pete was fighting depression based on our options, his vertigo-related nausea, the inability to stand up by himself, and the frustration of not getting better. It turns out that he was a lot more ready to consider hospice than I was.
January 7th, Pete asked me to take a drive with him. We drove by the Ramah Wildlife Refuge and he asked my opinion on him being in hospice. I cried and told him that I’m not ready for him to leave me but that it’s his choice. He then asked me to look into hospice. Once I found out about my insurance’s coverage, we decided we would get that set up.
January 10th, we spoke on the phone with Pikes Peak Palliative and Hospice Care and had the intake nurse come the next day. Right away, we felt at peace and loved by all of the staff.
January 13th, we announced our decision to put Pete in hospice to our Facebook group. Prior to this announcement, a friend asked me if we had a good support system. I told him that I felt that as soon as people knew and we expressed physical things that we could be helped with, we would have a flood of people wanting to help us. That has been very true.
The 14th, Briannah and her friend came for the weekend and Becca moved home. We had a great week, balancing the girls getting out of the house and being tourists with Brooke and spending some quality time with us.
So, now when someone asks me what happened and when it happened, I give them a better answer.
We love and appreciate you all and how you’ve rearranged your lives to visit, feed, clean clothes and our house, shovel our driveway, run items to Goodwill, and so many other things. We have been blessed by your spiritual, physical, and emotional support and we are so thankful.
