Dia on 23/2/2012 at 04:03

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God only knows why I started this stupid thread. It wasn’t as a bid for pity, which is an anathema to me, nor was it for sympathy. I guess this just seemed the right place to go, once again, when my mind and soul are aching and I need input from people I consider friends. Or maybe I just need to vent.

My brother is in the hospital with cancer, though no one has actually said the word, preferring to use terms like ‘possible metastasis’ and ‘lesions’ and ‘masses’ and ‘nodules’. They’ve put him in the oncology ward while they run more tests and tomorrow he’s scheduled for a biopsy on one of the’ masses’ in his chest. CT scans and MRIs have shown that he has ‘masses’ and ‘nodules’ in both lungs, throughout his body cavity, on either side of his trachea, and ‘lesions’ on the bones of his spine, his ribcage, his liver, kidneys, and his skull. He has four different doctors; all with varying opinions on what type of cancer they think it is (they’re now saying it could be either terminal lung cancer or treatable lymphoma), but haven’t been able to actually find out via a biopsy since the anesthesiologist (of all people) refused to put him under today for the originally scheduled biopsy as she believed his heart was racing too fast. The result was more cardio tests throughout the afternoon. But the oncologist and thoracic surgeon are persevering and have rescheduled the biopsy for tomorrow afternoon.

My brother (Dirk) is 57 yrs. old, an alcoholic, addicted to prescription drugs, is diabetic, has titanium pins in his spine and suffers from severe pancreatitis. Amazingly, he’s held the same job for the past 35 yrs. taking time off only when he ended up in the hospital for one thing or another. At the moment he probably weighs about 110 lbs. soaking wet (he’s 6 ft. tall) and has to be heavily sedated, not just for the pain since one of the ‘masses’ has pressed up against his spine to the point of fracturing one of his vertebra, but because if he has the chance, he’ll pull out his IV’s, rip off the patches connecting him to all the monitors, call a taxi and go home to the hellhole he calls a house (he actually did that about a month ago when the hospital originally wanted to do a CT scan of his chest - he was having chest pains then). He lost his license two years ago as a result of accomplishing the difficult task of getting four DUI’s in less than six months. He’s obsessed beyond the point of reason with just going home. I doubt that he even knows where he is right now, nor does he seem to care – he just wants to go home. Dirk has led a miserable life of falling off the wagon, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in rehab, and breaking the hearts of his family over and over again. My sister and I are all that’s left of our family: our dad died in March of 2009 (less than 3yrs. after my husband Bart’s untimely and sudden death), and our mom died in August of 2010. Both suffered from cancer and at this point my sister and I feel as though we’re reliving the most God-awful nightmare we’ve ever known.

We had to care for Dad and then Mom while they fought their respective battles. We had to watch them slowly waste away and finally take their last breaths. Our parents were good, honest, hard-working people who did their level best to raise us into adulthood. Our brother never married or had children, and over the years broke the hearts of several wonderful, sweet women who loved him and thought they could help him get sober and straight. Dirk isn’t a bad person, just a serious alcoholic/drug addict who behaves as an alcoholic/addict does: i.e. they only think of their next drink or where they can score their next vial of pills. He honestly has nothing to go home to; just an empty, filthy house and the threat of losing his job from recently taking unapproved time off. That’s if he doesn’t end up in jail for violating his probation because he was so out of it and incoherent he couldn’t call his probation officer to let her know he was in the ER yet again. Yet he is our brother and we love him.

If the ‘masses’, ‘lesions’, and ‘nodules’ prove to be treatable (which in truth just doesn’t sound possible to us, but then miracles do still happen, right?), my sister and I know that our brother will refuse treatment (he detests hospitals – especially needles). Nor do we believe he can physically withstand chemotherapy even if we could, by yet another miracle, persuade him to accept it, as at this point he’s in such severely bad physical shape. Do we force him to let us help make him healthy enough to accept the chemo (radiation is out of the question since the masses, etc., are so widespread throughout his body) by filing a petition with the court, claiming he’s mentally incompetent to make the decision on his own, or do we just leave him be and accept his decision? He’s said on more than one occasion that he would rather die than have to go through what our parents went through while fighting their respective battles with cancer. My sister and I are scared shitless at the prospect of trying to get the courts to legally allow us to force him to accept treatment.

If it turns out that Dirk has untreatable cancer, he’ll most likely have to go into a hospice, since the hospital won’t allow him to die there. There’s no way my sister or I can or will move in with him in his home to care for him while he lives out his last days, either. We did that with my dad and after two months of trying to care for him we were both suffering from exhaustion and severe depression, plus various bumps, bruises and bites. Dad was a big man and prone to fits of dementia.

The bitch of it is, we won’t know until the results of the biopsy are available and we were told that could take up to a week or longer. At this point the hospital personnel are still trying to force him to sit up and eat, but it’s seriously painful for him to swallow due to the masses on either side of his trachea, plus he’s so out of it from the sedatives that he just ends up sitting there drooling. We’re hoping beyond hope that somehow the hospital will be able to use a feeding tube to keep him alive in the interim. But he’s fighting us and the hospital every step of the way. Just this afternoon it took three of us to hold him down so the nurses could take more blood; we don’t understand where he’s getting his strength from anymore.

I, for one, think that one of the worst things a person can experience is watching a loved one die a slow, lingering death. Yet it’s happened twice in our family already and now my beloved sister and I are facing round three. When do you just throw in the towel and walk away? I don’t think we can, though God forgive us because at this point we’d like to.


Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.

Martin Karne on 23/2/2012 at 07:09

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Sucks big time to have someone you know passing through this shit.
Maybe they can save him (but then again some doctors just talk to keep you going day by day).
Good luck to him.

nickie on 23/2/2012 at 08:20

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I'm sorry Dia - more than your fair share I think. But you're strong and you will cope. And of course you'd come here. When the chips are down and all that, CommChatters are seriously nice people. Love to you.

Sg3 on 24/2/2012 at 00:45

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Yeah, one would be hard-pressed to find someone willing to extend kindness in these situations. I hope that someone has the heart to do the right thing when I'm in that position, but I don't hold much hope for it, as almost everyone seems hell-bent on making the victim suffer for as long as possible.

Mr.Duck on 24/2/2012 at 02:39

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*Does not have any words, so he kisses your forehead and hugs you tight instead*