kvetching up

The new year is a dour mistress. I am overwhelmed with sadness, having entered the two months of Jenny's suffering that would make Christ blush for complaining about his crown of thorns, the nails in his wrists, the spears poked into his torso. There is no great lesson from this suffering, other than life isn't fair. Jenny may have failed me and the kids, but damn it if she didn't make the lives of hundreds or thousands of kids better in the work she did. She allayed suffering for so many, only to be killed by her own body in the most painful and lingering way. I did my best to ease her pain, but my attempts were no match for pancreatic cancer. Her sorrow permeated everything, like gamma rays penetrating all of us. I just didn't want her to suffer . We couldn't stop the inevitable, but we could do our best to make her last few months, weeks, days better. She didn't make that task simple, it was never going to be easy. I go back and read earlier posts on occasion...

 Entry 1     9:20 a.m. It's all too much for Jenny. It's all too much for the girls. It's all too much for me. Jenny's abdominal pain has yet to go away completely, which was the promise of the procedure. She took her morning pain relief medicine, and the pain stopped, so that is some progress. But yesterday was incredibly hard for her. She really didn't move from the couch. Last night I drove Chris' family to the airport--Abby shuttling 2 of the 5 people in her car. The plan had been for Jenny to drive one of the cars. She was too weak. While we were taking the family to the airport, Jenny tried to get up from the couch to wash a mug. She was too winded to do it when she got to the sink.  I made breakfast yesterday  morning for everyone, Jenny and a couple friends, Abby and I.  Jenny complained of being in pain still, and I made sure she got her medication. I suggested that by today the celiac plexus block procedure should work. I didn't really know, ...

 Entry 1     9:36 a.m. I am at work. Jenny texted me to tell me pain woke her up and she can't get out of bed. I called her and she couldn't stop crying. I tried to comfort her by acknowledging the hell she is going through and telling her I love her, but my words are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. The suffering just keeps washing over her, and here I am, ineffectual.   I called her friend Heather, the one who just cancelled or postponed her trip to London to be around to help Jenny. She is on her way over. Leiney is with Jenny now, but it's too much to expect her to do on her own. Please let Jenny make it through her birthday.

Imagine your loved one is suffering from a terminal illness.  Fighting off death valiantly, but suffering inconceivable agony while trying to forestall the inevitable. The  suffering is every day, but the agony arises several days every other week as a reaction. To the chemo.  Your loved one, after every single chemo, wants to quit. She tells you, quite seriously, she can't stand to suffer any more, her eyes pleading for you to rescue her. The misery slowly abates over several days, and she forgets just enough of the pain to keep going forward. Banner day.  I went to my office. I spent several hours on the 54th floor, alone.  Creepy. Jenny's chemo was today. She was sick tonight and is miserable.  I, otoh, have to sleep now. More later.

"What The Actual Fuck?" Entry 1     10:06 a.m. I reached out to the care team over the weekend via email, given Jenny's current state of pain.  I want to stress, before I describe the latest event, that this suffering is happening to all of us, not just Jenny.  She is experiencing horrible pain and lethargy.  The kids and I are dealing with our inability to help, standing by helplessly watching as she doubles over in pain, crawls on all fours, begs for death.  Her lethargy makes it hard to plan anything. So, at 10 AM, the nurse from the palliative care team calls in response to my e-mail.  They would like to see Jenny, they tell me.  I go to Jenny, who is just out of the shower and toweling off, and tell her they would like to see her at 12:30 or 1:30.  She, annoyed with me says, "I didn't know they were calling. " I remind her of the email I sent, and that she read.  She told me she has scrabble with friends today and can't go....

[Note Accident and Emergency is what the call emergency rooms in the UK] have you been here waiting long?  with the others whose evening"s gone wrong have you been here waiting long? --from Accident and Emergency by Lucy Wainwright Roche   What a weekend.  Can I even remember all the events, I'm not sure.  So, Ill just touch on a couple of things. Yesterday Jenny and I spent the day together all around Seattle and Renton, ending up at the Jacob Lawrence Exhibition at SAM in the afternoon.  We went with Jane and Mike.  I like SAM much more than I used to, both its standing and traveling exhibits. Benedict Arnold In the evening, we continued hanging out, watching What About Bob, one of the great Bill Murray movies, with Leiney. We were out again this morning, Sunday, the two of us running around before we met with a financial advisor, who us helping us understand how to better plan for retirement, and who was impressed with what we have done so far.  T...

Sorrow -- Van Gogh 1882 I want to fix her. I want to find a cure, a way to stop the suffering.  The agony is real. Ceaseless. The fear corporeal. Tonight, I started receiving harrowingly sad texts as I sat in Abby's car at YTN.  My heart broke into a million pieces again and again with each message.  I found her at home in the bathtub for the third time today, abdominal cramps from the cancer leaving her ashen and bereft. It took 3 visits the the bathroom to coax her from the now tepid water, which she had been in for over an hour.  I pulled the plug, and got her up, wrapped her towel around her. Dried her off.  The sorrow in her eyes leaving knife wounds wherever they came to rest on me. Mostly, she stared vacantly into space, not resolute, not resigned, not stoic.  Lost.  Even asking to no one in particular, "Is this what it was all for?"  "Can this really be it?" "Why?"  I left her alone in our cramped bathroom. Fifteen minutes later, aft...

That amazing grace Thought it passed you by You wake up every day, and you start to cry You want to die But you just can't quit   The little bastard in yellow is causing the problem. I have been journaling off and on on blogger since before Leiney was born. Until December or January, I never went back and looked at postings.  Even now, I do so sparingly.  Today, reviewing a post from February 2008, I learned that the research I have been doing on Jenny's cancer is the same behavior I engaged in when my mother had ovarian cancer.  Attendant with that research is my tendency to latch on to the worst case scenarios. To be clear, Jenny has stage IVb pancreas cancer.  That means it has spread outside of the pancreas to distant organs.  It's on her liver.  She has a 5% chance of surviving 5 years after diagnosis.  She was sick in October of 2019.  It became unbearable in late May of 2020, when she lost 25 lbs. in a month.  I had been asking he...