When you lose someone you love to a terminal illness, it's hard not to look back at the choices you made and wonder if anything could have been different. With cancer, there are so many options and variables that inevitably there will be roads not taken. I have taken solace in knowing (hoping, really) that my mother, sister, and I made the best decisions we could for my dad at the end of his life with the information available.
What I struggle with is all the information that has since become available. Within a month after dad died, there was this excellent New Yorker article about the benefits of hospice, which made me wonder whether we could have improved his quality of life, if not extended his time, if we had made that move sooner. Then there was this news, about an experimental drug for the kind of cancer my dad had. Before the obvious beginning of the end, I had been in the process of getting him into a compassionate use study to get that drug right at his home hospital. Should I have kicked down the door sooner?
I try not to torture myself, because that won't bring him back. And the truth is, he had stage four lung cancer, and he lived a good life despite it for a very long time. But lung cancer is the top cause of cancer death for a reason. So the way forward has to be to focus on what was good about his life, rather than what was painful about the end.
New research may help you if you are ever in a position to need it, but I can't let it color the way I feel about those last few weeks. If nothing else, I am glad I was there just to be with him during his last days.
No comments:
Post a Comment