Today is Tuesday, March 11th, 2003. I received a call from the hospital about an hour ago to come quickly. I rushed to pick up my 2 sons from school and drove to the hospital. Now, I am waiting in the emergency room. It all started about a year and a half ago.
It was Thursday on September the 18th. My wife worked as a librarian at the library 4 blocks down the street from our house. I worked about half a mile away from our house at the school, teaching college students. My kids were only 11 and 14 years old. At 5:00 P.M. that day, my wife called me to pick her up, she said that she had excruciating pain in her thigh. She usually walked to and from work. For the past month or so, she has been feeling a weird pain in the side of her leg. After a week, the pain increased, and she started taking painkillers. Now, pain killers weren't enough to stop the pain.
The next day, she took the day off work and I took her to the hospital to have her checked out. After 2 hours of waiting in the waiting room and being examined for 2 hours, the doctors came to us and told us that she had a tumor in her leg. Thankfully, the tumor was near the outside of the leg, so it could be easily removed.
A week later, on September the 27th, we went back to the hospital for her surgery. The kids came along to cheer her up. We waited a little over an hour for her surgery to be completed. The doctors told us that it was successful and there was no more tumor in her leg. She could go back to work in a week.
Everything was fine for the next 6 months. Then, my wife started feeling pain again. But this time, it was farther up her body, around her hips. On June 6th, we went back to the hospital. The doctors discovered that the tumor has spread to her pelvic bone. Our only option was to amputate her leg and part of her pelvic bone to remove the tumor. And so we did. On December 11th, my wife went back into the surgery room for 4 hours. When she came back out, she was in a wheelchair.
Everything now seemed fine. She was no longer feeling any pain. Getting around in a wheelchair was difficult for her at first, but she was getting used to it. She went back to work after about a month. But after 8 months, it happened again. She was feeling pain again, but this time it was in her chest.
And again, we went back to the hospital. And again, the doctors examined her. And again, they found a tumor inside of her. The tumor had worked its way into her lungs. We were devastated. We finally thought that it was over.
But it wasn't.
On February 23rd, she started chemo therapy. After 3 sessions, she could no longer take the pain of it. She would rather slowly die of the cancer than to go through such horrific pain. Her last chemo session was on the last day of February. She stayed home, living with the tumor inside of her. Today it is March 11th, 2003. And here I am, waiting in the hospital once again. After about waiting for what felt like a life time, the doctor came out to talk to me.
"I'm sorry to tell you this, but your wife has passed away."
No comments:
Post a Comment