The night before was a Sunday; at that point, he was two days in to the first (and only) chemo he would receive to treat the cancer in his spinal chord. It didn't work -- Mother and I had spent the better part of the week before fighting over whether he should even have it, because she wanted no heroic measures at all, while I wanted to give Dad one last chance because it just seemed horrifyingly cruel that the man couldn't swallow; and the doctor I consulted with felt that by giving chemo directly into the spinal chord, it could conceivably buy him another six to nine months. (That doesn't mean she wanted him dead, so don't jump on the "Hate Mother" wagon just yet. It's more complicated than that.) So anyway, he was almost completely comatose, and I was waiting for a consultation with the gastro doctor to see whether we would be putting in a feeding tube, because at that point, he would be transferred to a nursing home while he was receiving chemo to get his strength back up, etc. Well, when the doctor came in, he looked at Dad and the charts and said that while he's done many feeding tube surgeries on patients in as bad a condition as Dad, he couldn't guarantee that a) Dad would even make it out of surgery and b) that it would be a successful endeavor overall. He said to think it over and talk with Mother about what we would do, and if we decided at the 11 hour that we wouldn't do the surgery, it wouldn't be a problem.

We didn't get to make the choice. I was driving to the hospital around 9:30-ish when I got the call from Pam, Dad's favorite nurse on the oncology ward: He'd gone into Cheyne-Stokes respiration. Surgery wouldn't be a good idea, but Hospice would be.Oh, whatEVER.