After fixing one of our folding bicycles and dealing with all matter of things from outstanding phone calls this morning, I drove over to Addenbrooke’s Hospital and visited my Dad, who looked a poor figure with sagging facial muscles and a crooked smile. The doctor tells us that this cancer is spreading, operating is not practicable, and they are not considering radiotherapy is the only other option. We can only keep him comfortable and he will soon be discharged and found the hospice.
Time this evening with a colleague adopting a logo for the St Neots Museum committee as news of a £2 billion trade deficit threatens the continuation of high interest rates for the foreseeable future.
I was late to bed and then had an early call with the result that I ended up quite tired this morning. I then settled down in my office and tackled the problem with one of our folding bicycles, but I managed to free the pedal and put things to rights. I had a series of phone calls to return from yesterday. There was all manner of things to deal with and each seem to take a lot of trouble and enquiry of others, but I’d done them by the end of the morning. I had lunch with Diana and then, this afternoon, I drove over to Addenbrooke’s Hospital and visited my Dad.
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He looked a poor figure with his bandage over his right ear and hair net to hold a dressing in place. His facial muscles on the right side are sagging and his smile (when he ventures one) is one-sided to the left. He is in constant pain which the medicines can dull but not dispel. I chatted for a while and he was quite conscious and lucid.
Then I went for a walk to the shops in the foyer to see if I could get him any slippers and to fill in time until the doctor was available. When I saw him, the news was not good. They say that the cancer has spread from the ear to his glands and is now affecting the nerves in his neck. To consider surgery would mean removing so much tissue (including ‘half of his brain’) that it is not practicable. The other way forward is a further course of radiotherapy which also seems one that they are not prepared to consider.
Dad will now be on a course of decline as the cancer spreads and his body is taken over. All that we can do is to keep in comfortable. Dad does not yet know all this but will learn when the senior doctor returns on Thursday and discharges him for his doctor to find a hospice. I hope that mum and dad can be reconciled and resigned to the rest of Dad’s time together to give some peace for these last weeks or months.
Home to tea and then, this evening, Paul Todd of the St Neots Museum Committee came around and we used his sketch for a museum logo and I produce and letterheads on my computerised publishing facility. To bed late again. News today of a £2 billion trade deficit which threatens the continuation of high interest rates for the foreseeable future. The US and USSR are trading proposals for the curtailment of use of chemical weapons