My Darling Dennis by Marilyn
NO ONE would ever expect what 2003 was about to bring us.
In Nov 2002, Dennis (my husband) went to the doctor for a yearly check up. He come home and told me that he has type 2 diabetes, and the doctor prescribed a pill for it and he had to check his sugar once a day. We wound later find out that in November his PSA (prostate level) was a 3. The doctor never indicated to him that it was elevated.
On January 3, 2003 we celebrated Dennis’s 50th birthday.
In February Dennis started experiencing difficulty in urinating, after about a week and staying off the sodas and drinking a lot of cranberry juice, he decided to go to the doctor.
The doctor said it was probably a kidney infection or kidney stone, gave him some antibiotic and sent him home. Two weeks later it got worse, so he went back, at that time he had a severe pain in his rib area. The doctor sent him on for a bone scan, a CT scan and a sonogram (hoping that his problem was possibly gallbladder).
The next week we went in and got the worse possible news there was. The doctor said, “You have terminal lung cancer and bone cancer, there is nothing we can do but keep you as pain free as we possibly can.” Oh my gosh, our world had just come to an end; this was horrible, how could this be? Here is a man that has been healthy as a horse all our 32 years of marriage and now to be told he is dieing from cancer. YES, Dennis was a smoker, but never showed any signs of lung cancer like my mom did. She coughed and spit stuff up for a couple of years before she died in 1987 from lung cancer.
We was angry, that the doctor could be so cold about his news he just told us, so we made an appointment with the lung specialist hoping to prove him wrong. He looked at the scans and said that my husband was not a poster child for a lung cancer patient. He had no signs of lung cancer, therefore wanted to do a biopsy to make sure of the results. The results proved to be stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer. He told us he was totally shocked by these results because Dennis showed no signs of the lung cancer and lungs sounded good. He put in a porta cath, I asked WHY? He said “Marilyn he is only 50 years old, we have to do everything we can for him”. The doctor set up an appointment with the oncologist.
Mean time in mid April we went to the urologist for his urinating problem, the doctor said that the chances of him having prostate cancer were very, very, low, but he wanted to do a biopsy and see for sure. The same as before, the worse news we could get, he had stage 4 prostate cancer. His PSA was only 6 but Gleason Score was a 7.
The beginning of May they gave him a Lupron shot for the Prostate Cancer. The Lupron shot not only killed his sex life completely but it was suppose to put the cancer in remission and relieve most of the symptoms which it DID NOT!
Dennis was still up every 15 minutes having to urinate…. up several hours in the night.
In May we also saw the oncologist, he told us Dennis had 3 months to a year to live….. and possibly 2 years with the chemo. Dennis started the chemo that day. He had three treatments 3 weeks apart and then they were supposed to do a rescan to see if the spot 1cm in size had shrunk and the cancer in the bone reversed.
Well it took 3 weeks to get an appointment for the rescan, by now Dennis was in pain a lot, sleeping a lot, not eating much, getting very weak. We made it to the rescans (three different days of this) and on Friday Aug 1, I called the doctor, told him I wanted to check in with him since the weekend was coming up to let him know what was going on. The weekend before that Dennis’s left eye was swollen over and the other one appeared to be kinda bugged out. I told the Dr that was much better, but that he was so constipated, even with help to relieve his bowels, he was still not going, he was in a great deal of pain, very confused and not eating. Doctor told me it sounded like some kind of obstruction and to take him to the ER and he would order some test. We got in there and the nurse asked him on a scale of 1-10 what was his pain level….. He said 8. They gave him a small dose of morphine and oxygen and then did an x-ray. The x-ray showed a pancreatic problem. They admitted him. That was on Friday August 1, while in the hosp, he was in a lot of pain and confused. On Wednesday August 6, they sent him home with oxygen and a home health care to come out once a day to check on him.
That night when we got home from the hospital, he was so confused, kept wanting to urinate everywhere except the bathroom, his legs were swollen so bad, he was so confused. I was up every 10 minutes with him helping him go to the bathroom. The next day (Thursday Aug 7) he was worse, a lot of pain, hard to breath, wasn’t eating, sugar level was at 350, his speech was slurred, so I called and the doctor said to get him back in there. We got there about 1pm they direct admitted him. About 4pm he started chilling really bad, the nurse said that usually a fever follows. About 4:10 he jumps up out of bed as if the house was on fire, jerks off his oxygen and tries to rip off his hospital gown, and is setting on the side of the bed. I asked him what was wrong, he said I can’t breath…I buzzed for the nurse, and then went out into the hallway to hurry her up. She worked with him about 5 minutes then rang for more help, when two more nurses come in she said “he is crashing”.
I ran out of the room, had to call someone to come up there to be with me, I didn’t want to be alone. The doctor got off the elevator at that time and told me I needed to “let him go”. That something catastrophic was happening to him. They took him to ICU about 5pm, by then my daughter and half of the Sheriff Department was there with me (that where he worked). We didn’t get to see him till 8 because they were trying to stabilize him and run some test on him. When we (my daughter and I) went, the doctor told us that there was a 90% chance that he wouldn’t make it through the night, that he had internal bleeding, lungs was full of possible blood but he knew it was fluid of some kind and his brain was swollen. He was tied down to the bed, cause he kept trying to get up, they had oxygen on him and by then he was running a 106 temp.
At 10:30 his vitals had gone down to 60 over 45.
At 11:30 I went in to tell him how much I loved him and that I was going to be OK (that was his big concern is what would happen to Marilyn if I should die), and that it was OK to go to sleep and be out of pain. His eyes were open but he couldn’t see anymore, but his head was turned towards me, he was hearing me. A couple minutes later, when he didn’t hear my voice he would start getting agitated again and I would talk to him again, I told him our son in Germany said he is on his way and that he loved him very much, and then repeated to him all the things I told him a few minutes ago, he calm down again. Then at 12:15 am August 8 Dennis just quietly went to sleep and stop breathing. God took my Dennis home.
The end was nothing like I thought it would be... I thought it would be very dramatic, but it wasn’t, it was very peaceful.
One thing I want people to watch out for, is fighting cancer is one thing, but when you are fighting cancer and diabetes it’s a whole new ballgame, it makes it much more serious.
