Boom

I am getting REALLY sick of being so goddamned right all the time.

I knew chemotherapy would be rough on my dad. I knew his doctor was pumping him full of horseshit by saying crap like, "You're gonna feel better after just one session!" My vote was hospice, not chemo, for better, more peaceful time, not more-at-any-miserable-wretched-cost time. 

But I also knew that someone else's cancer is not a democracy. He wanted the chemo. The more. So I just hoped it wouldn't be as bad as I feared.

It was so bad they had to halt treatment just hours in because his reaction was so violent. They tinkered and restarted, but it was still so bad that by the time my mother picked him up (she couldn't handle staying there, because HER reaction to seeing other people going through it was also pretty violent, in its own way), he was running a high fever and covered in vomit. 

Within hours he was running a fever of over 103 and in an ambulance, headed to the ER. 

"Huh," his doctor said, when my mom called to find out if she should call 911. "Yeah." 

His platelets were down to 10. His hemoglobin was at 7. He was bleeding internally. He was given a private nurse IN THE ER, and it sure as hell wasn't because they were lacking patients elsewhere. 

Tranfusions. CAT scan. Up to ICU. Chemo session #2 was canceled, though he continued to insist that he wanted to keep going, because he continued to amaze everyone around him by not being at all as sickly as someone as sick as he is should be.  "Okay, we'll call it postponed, then."

Then, after all the little firecrackers that startled and alarmed, the bomb dropped: His spleen is enlarged, which means the cancer is officially Stage 4.

It was Stage 3 last week. LAST WEEK. 

That was the week I talked a good game about better time, instead of more. 

Cancer is calling my bluff.