I've tried blogging before, but I never really got motivated to keep up with it. I don't know if this latest try is going to be any more successful, but I'm going to give it a shot. During the last two years I have experiences some of the best (as well as the absolute worst) experiences of my life so far.
I went back to school to get my Master's in Library and Information Science, which involved moving 3000 miles across country to Boston from Northern California away from my family and friends. I had a great experience. I loved it, even though I didn't always love Boston, Simmons College (at least residence campus life), and cold winters. However, I'm very glad I had the experience, and I'm very proud of my accomplishment.
The worst thing was my dad died. He had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer right before I left for school. I tried to tell him that I could defer for a year, but he wouldn't hear of it. He vehemently told me that I was going to school. The ironic thing is that he beat the cancer. Right before he died, he had a scan that showed the cancer was gone. The problem was that his lungs had been damaged by the radiation he received as part of his cancer treatment. He had a bad infection, and his health was severely compromised. He'd lost 70 lbs. and was very weak. His lungs were infected, and he was intubated to help him breathe. He hated it, and he insisted on having the tube removed. His lungs just weren't strong enough for him to breathe on his own. We sat with him through the night, and he stopped breathing about 3am on December 23, 2008. It was the absolute worst thing I've ever experienced. I miss him so much.
I'm also still very angry about it. I have a lot of questions that I want to ask the doctors. When my dad found out his lungs were damaged by the radiation, he told my mom that if he died from the lung damage that he wanted her to sue. But my mom works at the local hospital, and she works with these doctors all the time. She could never sue and still work there. She didn't want to sue, and I don't either. Money isn't going to make me stop missing my dad. However, I'm stuck here still wondering why...why didn't the doctors tell my dad that the radiation could damage his lungs? Why didn't they monitor his lung health during his treatment and aftercare? Why did they let it get so bad before doing anything to help?
My dad was very weak, and he had lost too much weight. He had nausea constantly for months, and food didn't taste good--probably a side effect of some of his treatment. It's just that right before he ended up in the hospital that last time, he and my mom had talked, and he had decided to go ahead with having a feeding tube inserted so he could get some nutrition and put some weight back on and get stronger without having to deal with the constant nausea. I talked to him at the beginning of December, and that night we went to the hospital. They ran tests and then performed the surgery for the feeding tube. However, during the surgery they found a bad infection in his lungs. They did what they could to clean them out and put him on antibiotics, but they had to give him a breathing tube.
I guess I just feel that maybe, just maybe, if the doctors had caught the lung damage early on, they could have changed his treatment or at least monitored it so that it could be managed while he was finishing treatment. It's hard to accept that the doctors didn't bother to do anything about watching out for such a serious, and potentially life-threatening, side effect. The problem is that I don't know anything. My mom doesn't talk about it much. I want some answers, and I really want to talk to the doctors about my dad's case. I want them to explain to me why they did nothing about his lung damage. I want them to tell me that since what happened to my dad, they've instituted a new policy so that anytime they prescribe that same radiation to patients, they will warn them of the possibility of lung damage, AND they will monitor the patients' lung health throughout the treatment and aftercare. I'm so angry and sad and disbelieving even now. They talk about the 5 stages of grief, but they don't tell you that you'll have them all at once. Sometimes I think I will go completely crazy from the chaos of my thoughts.
Well, this entry didn't start out to be about my grief, but that's were it ended up. If anyone has any suggestions for going about talking to doctors about my dad's case, I'd appreciate it. I know that doctors don't like to have this type of conversation. They are so worried about malpractice suits that they never admit to making mistakes even when they do make mistakes.
Anyway, this is where I start with my blog. Check back for (hopefully) more upbeat entries. By the way, the blog title comes from my time in library school. 020 is the Dewey Decimal classification for Library & Information Science. I'll talk about libraries in this blog, I'm sure, but I'll probably talk more about other things in my life. I love to be creative, and I've been pretty obsessed lately about my own creativity and doing more. We'll see how that goes.
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