Remember Their Names

“In January 2017, my Pop starting feeling fatigued enough where he would come by from work and nap on his lunch break. In May, he was diagnosed with Type I diabetes, which is in our family, so we didn’t think anything of it. Especially terminal cancer. He struggled deeply with the diabetes, the shock of that and the lifestyle changes were hard for him to accept. Even with the insulin shots and metformin, he still wasn’t getting better. We took our last family trip to Arizona and Vegas in September 2017. His pancreas, liver and one kidney were already made up of cancer by then but we still thought it was just diabetes. We were supposed to spend a few days in Colorado Springs, but we had to end the trip early. My Pop had his yearly scan, due to having prostate cancer years before, a few months before his diagnosis. He was sent to OU Medical in OKC, where they discovered it was pancreatic cancer. He began chemo in November at the Cancer Treatment Center of America in Tulsa. I still had hopes, only because I was not familiar with the very low survival rate. After a few sessions, he started struggling with eating because everything tasted like cardboard to him and dropped a lot of weight. My Pop had to stop his job working as a truck driver and was spending all his time in the recliner. The more I saw him, the more afraid I got because deep down, I knew he was dying. Luckily, we had one last Christmas together and I truly thought he was getting into a routine. He ate a big dinner, consisting of potato soup and I really had so much hope that night. Everything went downhill after Christmas. The week before my Pop went into hospice, he’d been at Mercy’s ER a few times, due to dehydration. Around 3 AM on January 8th, 2018, I remember still not being asleep yet when my Gram called and told us that he’d passed out in the bathroom from being too weak. Even though he stopped being coherent on day 3, he lasted a full week surrounded by family.”