One of the big “threshold moments” is making that mental shift from “curable” to “incurable.”
The first time it happened was when Dr. A (finally!!) slapped us in the face and told us how serious the cancer is, back in June. I still had to ask my question about whether we should freeze sperm, since the cancer drugs would be so aggressive and cause flipper babies if I was knocked up. What if we wanted another baby, eventually? I asked the question and it still took awhile to realize that there would be no more babies, because my husband was dying.
I’m reading Final Journeys: A Practical Guide for Bringing Care and Comfort at the End of Life
(by Maggie Callanan), from the hospice library. There’s a bit in there about pain control, and about how palliative care offers many more options than a typical doctor’s T3 prescription, and I realized that Brock has more options now that he has terminal cancer. For example, he’s always had trouble falling asleep, because of that busy brain of his, and maybe he never wanted to use sleeping pills because they’re addictive, or because they’d cause him to sleep in the next morning. But fuck it, why not now? He needs all the rest he can get, to help his body fend off these monster tumours. So why not have a cache of pills and if he’s still lying restless at 1am he can pop one?
Another bit was about CPR, and “do not resuscitate” orders. It seems crazy to me to not opt for CPR and save a life if that’s possible, but the book makes the point that, if the person’s life expectancy is only a few days or weeks or even months, it might not be worth risking the broken ribs and hospitalization that CPR can entail. That phrase, “quality of life,” is becoming the mantra of our world.
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More thoughts about this one, later in the day …
Our (as in, people’s) instinctual inclination is to Be Hopeful. There is judgement if we aren’t Hopeful For A Cure or Miracle. And I’m a positive, optimistic person normally, but then … there is Reality. And there comes a point where it is no longer helpful to be Hopeful For A Cure or Miracle, because the Reality is that my sweetie is very sick and will die decades earlier than expected.
I see this Hopefull-ness in Facebook comments, urging us to hold out hope. I hear it in people’s well-intentioned advice to try cannabis oil, or turmeric, or magic mushrooms, or juice, or vitamin C, or any of the many magical “cures” that will, apparently, halt the growth and spread of the monster tumours.
We waver daily between the Hopeful idea of eating three well-balanced, whole-food meals every day, and the desire to simply revel in cheesies and bacon & eggs and all the meals that we most love: our comfort foods, our convenience foods that leave more time for reading and other fun past-times. Once we accept that there is no cure, that the Reality is death, then we can let go of any guilt and forego those kale chips in favour of chip dip.
My Final Journeys book validates this. It says the priority is for the dying person to get all the calories they can, with pleasure, and if that means eating favourite comfort foods then so be it.
