Nice guy with a good heart
The overlook
On one of the worst days of my life Randy woke up with all the symptoms of pneumonia. We weren’t at the hospice stage yet - though looking back we should have been - so I was just thinking about getting him to the hospital. But I dithered a bit because cancer care meant Kaiser and lung care meant Stanford. And while pneumonia is a lung thing, pneumonia was the least of his problems. I was also dithering because we had a phone appointment with the oncologist and I didn’t want to miss it - she had moved it up from Monday to Friday, which was worrying.
I came down on the side of Stanford and messaged the oncologist to call my cell rather than do a zoom appointment. I got Randy into the car with his go bag and off we went, taking the familiar route across the bay. We’d made it across the bridge and were close to the peaceful part of the drive through gentle hills near the coast when the phone rang. I put it on speaker and gritted my teeth - there’s no good place to pull over on that part of the drive.
So Randy could hear everything the oncologist said, and it was all bad news, but he clearly wasn’t taking anything in. She told me that the MRI showed seriously advanced cancer on Randy’s spine. I reminded her that she had told us brain cancer doesn’t metastasize and she said, Right - not beyond the central nervous system. Which was news to me - if she had known that, why hadn’t she done an MRI on his spine when he first complained about the pain in his legs?
But all of that was just postponing the inevitable. I asked what this meant in terms of time left, and she told me the average is 1-3 months and that she was very sorry. I thanked her and hung up.
By this time we had reached the pretty part of the drive overlooking the reservoir so I pulled off to cry and pull myself together. We sat there in the sun looking at the beautiful blue sky and the blue reservoir surrounded by the green trees and the golden grasses, and I just cried. And Randy, who had been dozing and was in a state of mental fog and had NO idea what was going on, patted my leg until I stopped.
Because that is how good his heart was.
I think about this day now and I wish I had taken him to Kaiser where his palliative care team could see him. Or that I had just stayed home and asked the oncologist what would be the best thing to do or had an emergency consult with the palliative care team. Pointless to think about it now, but sometimes second guess myself. What would he have wanted if he’d been able to make his own decisions?