Friday, October 9, 2015

Month 9 - Bad Couple of Weeks

It has been a really bad couple of weeks.  Yesterday was the funeral for my wife's father who passed away having lost his long fight against prostate cancer.  

For much of his fight Garry led a normal and active life.  Such as is often the case with cancer his periods of remission allowed he and Sally to check things off their bucket lists.  A joke between us was the number of "trips of a lifetime" they were going to take after hitting Alaska/Canada, Asia, ANZ, Africa, and finally India.   Not to mention a bunch of trips to see us in the US and to see friends in Europe...etc...etc!

But the end was painful.  In the span of a year Garry went from active to barely able to move, had a couple strokes, and ended up bed ridden.   At that point the hill became an impossibly steep downward slope.   His last words to me were "I don't know what to do.".

To bring this back to MS.  Garry and I had talked about our respective diseases years ago.  I pointed out to him that he needed to do everything possible to take advantage of the time he had in remission.  I would give anything to have that chance but our diseases are different.   I would like to think that our conversations on the topic of our disease might have had a small influence on the plans that Garry made but I suspect he would have lived his life to the fullest in any case.

Would I trade?  Even knowing how bad the ending was?  In a heart beat.  With the caveat being that I would have arranged for an assisted exit to ease those last couple of months.  I am not suggesting that Garry should have done so, I never asked him what his position was on the right to die.  I only know what I would do.