These entries have been coming far less frequently than the events.  Apparently, I’m a worthless documentarian.

Dad and I were alone on Monday morning.  Everyone else at work.  Dad was in bed down the hall, and I in the living room half-watching TV and listening to music and wandering The Tubes.  He was in moaning, and at times, screaming, in pain.  After this went on for a couple of hours–in retrospect, I feel cruel for having waited so long–I called my mother.  She came home, we call an ambulance, he went to the hospital.

He got out yesterday.  He spent several days getting treated, lying down, with odd boots massaging his ankles to try to reduce the swelling in them, with a new chemo treatment to try to shrink his liver (which is now so large it stick about 20cm below his ribcage), and with a mountain of new and powerful painkillers.

He’s now so weak he cannot stand from the toilet without help.  He’s on oxygen.  We’ve put six pillows on top of a chair in the living room–it’s like a big stool now–so he can sit on it, and still have a fighting chance to stand again.

The doctor’s report that if this newest batch of chemo doesn’t take, he has only weeks to live.  Weeks.  So far, it’s not taking.  My mother, at this moment, is making phone calls to get help.  My brother and I are supposed to move out tomorrow.  She recently had shoulder surgery, and doesn’t have the strength to help him up the stairs, or out of a toilet seat, or just about anything else right now.

It would be surprising if he lasted until Christmas.