It has been a long time since I read the first post I made on this blog, back at the beginning of 2015, before our son was born. I mentioned the irony in my father looking after my mother in their later years, rather than the other way around, as might have been expected from their union. I haven't read much of anything else I've written since, as I feel a bit embarrassed about some of it to be honest, and I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm worried what my kids will think when they are old enough to read and understand it all.
The final sad irony now is that it is my father that faces an unknown and perhaps less predicatable future than my mum, and one exacerbated by his living alone. Mum at least is in a managed environment with people nearby keeping an eye on her round the clock, feeding, dressing and cleaning her. Dad has not been feeling well or eating properly recently, and struggling with day to day life. He looks and sounds so much more tired than he did only a few months ago, and I'm sure he's worried about losing that independence. Besides being partially deaf and blind (the cataract sugery some months ago gave him a new lease of life, but his sight has gone downhill again) and the ongoing heart problems, he now can't get out and about as much due to a bad hip.
The icing on the cake however, is that the doctors found something on his lung. We are waiting to be told officially, but in all likehihood it is cancer.
Cancer, cancer, cancer. They say that 1-in-2 people will get or be affected by cancer, which is a terrifying statistic. And here it finally comes knocking at our family's door.
When I read the copy of the letter sent from the Consultant Respiratory Physician to my father's GP, I pick up on words and phrases like "haemoptysis", "abnormal, "left lung mass", "liver and spinal metastasis", and "a frank conversation"...
And when I look up some of those terms to understand what he's facing, it really doesn't sound very good, and I've no idea what I'm suppose to do or how to react. I can't imagine what he was processing himself when speaking with them on the day.
He has been for a bronchoscopy and soon after that, an MRI. He has been referred to another diagnostic scan unit, and we now have an appointment for a PET-CT scan very soon.
I don't know what to be more anxious about: raising a toddler in a not-completely-comfortable home environment while also expecting another baby (we are a month away from the due date, and I haven't even touched on the emotions we're experiencing over that), or the dementia
and having to deal with the council (the recent care needs reviews
we've had resulted in mum being deemed not eligible for full continuing
care funding, which triggers its own set of problems), or dad's rapidly declining health.
You couldn't make it up.
We recently took dad with us to see mum at the nursing home - "Nana's House", as our son affectionately calls it. I took lots of photos of my parents together, as though I needed to get those final lasting shots of the two of them while I had the chance. I don't know if that's being pessimistic or morbid or giving up on things, but it really hit home just how aged and tired they both are. But this is life, and they are the best part of 80 years old after all. Mum had that usual confused frown on her face, but was comfortable and settled and was as alert as we could hope. Dad was understandably emotional, catching his breath every few minutes from coughing, and straining to hear whether she was saying anything coherent (which she wasn't).
Although mum may not have been fully aware of who he was or the problems he's facing, they looked quite content as they held hands. I was sure that it would be difficult for them to enjoy many more moments like that together, and dad will have realised this, even if mum would not.
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