My Journey Through My Dad’s Cancer

In February of 2018, I left work early. I work at a factory and just wasn’t feeling it that day. My mom and I came through the door and my dad was home. He was disabled, so he didn’t work. My mom worked with me. He was excited to see that my mom and I were home. He asked if everything was okay. We both told him yes. He sat my mom down and told her he had stage four esophageal cancer, which was caused by acid reflux.

He didn’t want to tell us much about it. He didn’t want us to come along for any of his treatments. So my mom and I stayed behind while he went. Then he’d go and stay at a friends house while he recovered afterwards. He explained to us that things didn’t taste the same anymore and it was just hard to eat in general. So we started buying soft foods and had a lot of soup.

He jumped between different chemo treatments for quite awhile. The first one, which worked the best, caused neuropathy so he wanted to switch. It shrank his tumor down to almost 50 percent! They either all made him really sick or didn’t make a difference.

One day he came home and said that it had spread. He now had it in his liver. The original plan was to use chemo and radiation to shrink it down as much as possible and then perform surgery to remove the rest of it. It seemed this was no longer possible. He continued switching chemos for a while until he started to get sicker. He went back to the doctor and came home with the news that changed everything.

He was no longer receiving chemo. It no longer helped. This was around the beginning of October in 2018. He tried to live a normal life, but he could no longer do most things he could normally do. Eventually, it got to the point where he could no longer eat and we had to take him to the hospital. He was there for about a week and the doctors ran a bunch of tests. The doctor came back and told us that he had masses of tumors around his liver. He said that as it stood he could not receive chemo right now and he could either receive hospice at the hospital or at home. The doctor kept saying that he could get better and receive chemo in the future which we all knew wasn’t true.

We took my dad home and received hospice from home. My boyfriend stayed with me to help us out. My mom and I took FMLA so we could stay home with my dad. We didn’t even have hospice for a month. Everything changed so suddenly. We were up and moving around and then all of a sudden he could no longer get out of bed. Our nurse came in and said she didn’t think he had much time left. She was afraid he was going to try and get out of bed. He was very independent and refused help from anybody.

I started calling all of the family members and everybody somewhat close started coming over and making visits. The house was constantly full. I was a daddy’s girl so, I was always lying next to him in bed. The nurse changed her visits to every day. She told us the news on a Monday. She said he was very jaundiced. Which means his liver was beginning to shut down and no longer filtered the toxic stuff out. He was very yellow.

On December 6, the nurse came back and said that she thought he had more time left—which was funny because at this point my dad was super unresponsive and stopped moving completely. Throughout the day we saw a drastic change. His breathing got louder and he started sounding like a fish out of water. We were worried and never left his side. He started getting worse throughout the night and my mom, my brother, my boyfriend, and I all took turns to go into the bedroom and basically say our goodbyes to Dad.

Then very early on December 7, he passed away. The next few days were very rough. We had to organize everything and my mom was in shock. It’s a journey we are still trying to get through and understand. It’s helped me realize that these things can happen to anybody. No matter how strong a person is.