What Happens?

What happens? What does a person do when a loved one gets cancer or some other life threatening disease? What would you, the reader do if your husband or wife should get cancer? Please leave your answers in comments if you leave me one. I remember when my dad got prostrate cancer, but I can't really remember how it affected me until I watched him die from it. About one-half-hour before he died Dad got the hiccups. He would hiccup every few minutes and finally hiccuped up quite a bit of blood. When he hiccuped up that blood, he also took his last breath at the same time. Dad only had the cancer about six months, but in that length of time it spread to his liver and ate it up as well.

When he first got cancer, the doctors told Mother that he should or would live about two years. Dad never came home from the hospital and only got worse. He did get to move to a hospital nearer home. About five or six months later the doctors wanted to do a biopsy of the liver to see whether or not the cancer had spread there. A cousin tried to talk Mother out of signing, but she wanted all the help for him that she could get and signed anyway. The cousin said that the biopsy caused her husband to die sooner than he otherwise would have. Sure enough after going through that biopsy Dad got pneumonia and died two weeks later. He actually died from the pneumonia rather than from cancer, and that was because of that biopsy. Maybe if Mother hadn't signed that paper he would have lived the two years. Who knows?

All my brothers and sisters were there when Dad died, but most were in the waiting room. Mother, my sister Mae, brother Lyle and I were in the room when he hiccuped really big and up came a bunch or blood. That was his last breath. Watching him die affected me in a way that I can't commence to describe. I had always respected the man because of how hard working he was and what a good husband and Dad he was, but we were never close. Still when I saw what he had gone through these last few months and watched him die I only wanted to go off by myself and be completely alone to think and try and sort out the issues of life and death that we were all faced with right then.

Never in my life did I want to have to go through that situation again but some 18 years later my brother Lyle died from cancer also. I was with him one Saturday afternoon and we visited, but he didn't say much. I checked on him again that night and told my wife that I was going back the next day after church, but I didn't get to. I knew that he was going to die any day now, and the next morning just before we were to leave for church my sister called and said, "He is gone." He had died earlier that morning. I was glad it was over because of how much pain he had been in the last nine months or so. Again I hoped I never had to go through it again.

About nine years later a lifelong friend moved back to Arkansas. He got sick soon after getting here and the doctors found he had a fungus when they finally figured out what was wrong with him. By the time they figured out what was wrong he was beyond help. He had gotten the fungus in Georgia, but it didn't show up until he moved out here and there was a change in the atmosphere. Some 12+ years after Lyle died Huston died also. I was there once again. I no longer hope that I never go through it again. I know that I will if I live long enough, and I suspect that it will be soon and in my own family once again.

None of the three had an easy life and their death wasn't easy either. I have always heard that a person dies like he/she lives. If they have an easy life they will have an easy death, but if their life is hard then dying will be as well. I don't know if that is always the case, but it certainly was with those three.