Update from Missouri

Thank you all so very much for all of your kind wishes, good thoughts, and prayers. I can feel them and I know they are helping. Please keep 'em coming.

The flight here did not do me in at least, and I got here just fine. It was a shock to see how tiny my dad has become and see him so sick so suddenly. Everyone here that sees him regularly tells me this came so fast and so hard. Hearing that makes it hard to imagine that he will linger a year as the prognosis seems to foretell. His doctor came to the house last night and said that the prognosis is a year but given my dad's heart troubles and not knowing where all the cancer has reached, it really can be any time. My dad is very very thin and can only lay on his left side to get any comfort and is still in pain then. He isn't all that weak yet, but can't sit up long enough to eat and doesn't want to eat anyway. We are giving him ensure as often as he will take it and trying to force small amounts of food but we don't get very far with that. He has a complication that is going to make this tough in that he can't have too strong a pain med or it makes his blood pressure drop too low. So he's kind of in a pickle there and I think that may make the end come sooner than later. He is going in for a bone scan Monday to see if the cancer has spread to his back bones where they can hit it with radiation to relieve the pain, but there will be no change in his prognosis.

Gall bladder cancer is very uncommon and very hard to find. It doesn't form a mass or tumor that is easily seen by any kind of medical imaging. And, usually, once it's found it's too late to treat well. But, it definitely started in the gall bladder and has likely spread to other areas like his back bones and there is some indications that it might be just now starting to affect his kidneys and pancreas, based on lab results from bloodwork. They are not going to do any other looking as it wouldn't change anything anyway.

Okay, so that's all the clinical reality side of this - still lots of unknowns. I am fine. I only break down a bit when people tell me mushy stuff and then the love and emotions kind of overwhelms my emotions a bit. But, I feel strangely matter of fact about this right now. Maybe I cried so much before I came that I have some room in my head to deal with it. The hardest part right now is having to be away from my family and not having my own support group here in person. I think that kind of makes me be tough until someone tells me something mushy and then I go to my soft side. My mom died many years ago so I have no family or personal friends here other than my dad's wife who he married about 4 years ago. She's wonderful but needs some TLC herself so I am kinda taking care of both. We will be calling in hospice in the next few days, maybe while my brother is here. My husband Kent is coming Thursday to Sunday just to see my dad and talk to the doctor and do a couple of chores around the house with my brother. My brother will be here a week and then won't be able to come much after that because of work. I think he only has 3 weeks of leave so we need to use it only when we absolutely need to.

So that's the story. I'm hoping in the next few days we'll all kind of settle into this and get my dad a little better taken care of or leveled off and then I might try to do some blog visiting and maybe even some collage sheet work if Kent can bring me my wacom tablet and get photoshop installed on my laptop this weekend.