A Bad Start To A New Year | Teen Ink

A Bad Start To A New Year

January 31, 2011
By Anonymous

A significant family event in my life was when we all found out my grandpa Harold had cancer in the summer of 2010. You go into a situation like that hoping maybe he’ll go into remission or maybe you’ll have a lot of time to spend with him. That wasn’t the case in this situation.

When my grandpa Harold got really sick no one in my family really knew what was wrong with him. He started loosing so much weight and wasn’t able to walk. We all thought it was just arthritis mixed with old age. My grandma Gladys arranged for him to go to the doctor to find out if this was a serious situation. He first went to doctor Bock who then scheduled him to go to the hospital in Springfield. They ran test and braced themselves for the worst. The doctors knew exactly what was going on but they wanted to run some more tests, keep him over night, and find out more information about what was going on before they notified us. They wanted to be sure. They ended up keeping him in the hospital longer then expected to build his strength up. They were afraid if they sent him home too early things would take a turn for the worst. When the doctors knew for sure what was going on they notified us that he had a tumor taking up a good part of one of his lungs. The first thing we all thought when we heard he had a tumor was that it was cancer. The doctors wanted to run some more tests on him to see if it was cancer or something that could be removed. The tests got back and the news wasn’t good. They told us that the tumor in his lung was cancer and he also had bone cancer. The cancer specialists gave him a year and a half with chemo or 6 months without it. He decided he wanted to start getting chemo. The news was rough but we found someway to deal. Once chemo had started we didn’t think he was gonna make it, he looked and felt absolutely terrible but after talking to the doctors they reassured us that it was obviously normal for someone who just started chemo to be this week and sick.

After the brutal several brutal months there was a ray of hope. We found out that the chemo had started working and shrunk most of his tumor in his right lung. At that moment we all thought he was gonna be fine. It was a good feeling knowing that he was doing better and feeling better. A couple months later we thought he was still fine, but then he wasn’t able to breathe we were worried so my grandma Gladys and uncle Jim called 911 to get an ambulance to the house right away because he was to weak to get in the car. They ran some tests and had found that the cancer had spread and the tumor now covered his entire right lung. He was now in ICU and they let us know that they were sure he wasn’t going to make it. He let the doctor know that he didn’t want chemo anymore and he just wanted pain medicine to sleep. They let us know that the medicine that they were gonna give him is gonna slow down his breathing so he can sleep. We were worried that the medicine would make him go faster, so we weren’t really sure but what he wanted we wanted. He was done suffering, he didn’t want to deal with it anymore. He wanted to die in peace. Two days after giving him the morphine my grandpa Harold passed away in the early morning of Thursday January 20th 2011. The worst way to start a new year.


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