One Year Later: Nov 28, 2023

Warning bad language as well as sad and raw topics in this post… You may want to pass on reading my posts this week.

It seemed fitting that I stay up way past my bed time to write this next post. Tonight I will be a bit sleep deprived, but it relates to the way I felt a year ago today.

Jami (and by proxy myself) didn’t sleep for more then 1 hour that night (11/28/22). Every hour she would wake up and puke in a bucket. Every time she woke up we were balancing a cocktail of drugs from morphine, Tylenol, anti-nausea, and various others (see the photo of the notes I was taking - this is only one of many pages). No combination of medicine, back rubs, cool wash cloths, baths, were helping. She is puking so much, even the medicines didn’t have time to work before they are ejected. At this point I have been up for over 24 hours with no sleep, but I don’t feel tired, I’m just working to keep her comfortable.

In the morning I called hospice again to let them know nothing is working. They gave us a few more options of medicine combinations to try throughout the day. When you call hospice they send you an entire pharmacy of drugs to have onsite and if you don’t have something they will send someone out right away to drop them off.

The nurse is also worried that all the puking is either going to rip the esophagus or rupture one of the many blood clots she’s been collecting due to the chemo and other meds.

After hospice, I called Jami’s family… Holy fuck was that hard. It took a while to get any words to come out of my mouth. I knew Jami was declining fast and we needed the entire family down here to see her and to help me out.

I tend to close my journal entries with how I am feeling at the moment, here is an excerpt of what I wrote: “God Damn it is hard to hold back the emotions. I am not an emotional person, probably to a fault, but holy fuck.. This fucking sucks! Fuck you again cancer.”

Welcome to raw unforgiving world of cancer and the caregivers who care for and love their people…