Well aren't I the blogger queen.  I just found this and my gosh, nearly three years from the  beginning of this and the time has gone by so quickly.

Those months were the nightmare everyone has but unless you have lived through it very closely with a cancer victim, it is nearly impossible to describe.  We have all known so many people who succumb to this awful disease but unless you live through it first had, you really have no idea...

He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a the first week of November, 2011 and we walked in to the cancer center for the first time on our 38th wedding anniversary.  His 57th birthday was spent in the hospital hooked to tubes and dealing with the ravages of chemicals that are supposed to kill the cancer.  For him though, there wasn't even a miracle that was going to fix it.  We just wanted to delay the inevitable so he could have another Christmas with us, and more importantly, meet the new grandchild scheduled to arrive the week before Christmas.

The rest is now a blur.  I do know he would not have survived to Christmas had we not done the chemo and radiation.  His liver was literally consumed with cancer and it had moved to the bones, kidneys, lymph nodes and lungs.  All that...and it was just at the original diagnosis.

The first round of chemo was to be done in the hospital and took five days.  They installed a port and a feed tube.  Then he was sent home for me to deal with things I'd never even heard of, let alone expected to have to understand and manage.  Medicines were so complicated, I ended up making a spread sheet and posted it on the kitchen cupboard, inside the door where we didn't have to look at it all the time.  It was the lifeline to sorting pills into the little boxes.  Those little boxes that are supposed to be for old grannies, not my vital, healthy husband.

The week of in-hospital chemo ended up being too harsh on his body and they immediately moved to plan B...a different drug that could be administered at the cancer center weekly with no hospital stays.  It was easier on us, but still Plan B. The good news in all this was the fact that our daughter was scheduled for a C--section in one hospital and those 5-day chemo deals were at another hospital across town.  We tried to get them in the same place but we ran in to doctors who couldn't go to the other hospital.  So in the end, he was home and we were able to greet our grandchild #7 in the traditional fashion.

She is a beautiful little one, now almost three years old, and I think some of her grandpa's spunk was given to her.  One of of now eight grandchildren, and she's the only one with curly hair...like his.  One out of eight grand children who has that Irish temper, just like his.  No worries...she'll learn to tame it.  He did.

Christmas was joyous and sad all at the same time.  We knew it would likely be his last, and yet we all tried hard not to think about it.

January came and towards the end of the month we were told the chemo had not done it's job to stop the growth and so it was ended.    We were switched from the hospital home care nurses to the palliative care nurses of Hospice.    All of them were angels with invisible wings.

St. Patrick's Day came and we had a big gathering.  Almost everyone in his family was there.  Brothers from out of town, nieces and nephews, with only one or two missing from his great big family.  It was a wonderful event, though he was weakening, and we all knew his time was near.

A few days after that, we had to have him admitted to a nursing home that had a cancer wing.  It was hard for him and devastating for me that I couldn't keep up his care, but the affects of the cancer on the liver messed up his blood and gave him such confusion he nearly stepped over the railing to the basement instead of taking the steps.  At that point, we knew it was time.

The nursing home was a place that I can only describe as being Heaven on our side of the pearly gates.  They were able to keep his meds adjusted so he was much better off than he would have been at home.  I brought his dog down to visit once and it was their last visit.  He was there at the nursing home 10 days before his last breath.

Our family gathered.  The caretaking ended just as suddenly as it began.