Hobbes
I know you are, but what am I?
I think that’s an appropriate 1st grade level response.
I didn’t fight for him. I didn’t even try. When I called his oncology doctor and left a message, I heard back from a nurse and got no information. And further, the nurse said that the doctor doesn’t speak with family of patients and wouldn’t be calling me back. I should have taken my rage at that obviously fucked response and done something, whether it be forcing him to talk to me, or finding another oncologist. But I didn’t. I just receded into myself and did nothing. Every single day I drove to the hospital over and over again, I’d pull over and cry before I got there. But I was so paralyzed by my fear about what was happening that I didn’t turn it into action. I just asked for a nicer chair in the hospital room so I could hang out for hours on end with my dad as he died. He would have done everything in his power to help me, and for some reason I was such a scared little shit that I didn’t think to become the caretaker of my dad, who was always my caretaker. He needed me and I failed him.
Just as an aside, my dad died horribly this past xmas after 6 months of cancer gradually destroying him and everything he’d worked so hard for. He was one of the most fit people I knew until that. He grew up skiing and was a junior patroller at 15 in colorado. By the time I was born, he was patrolling as a doctor and took me everywhere he could, and when he couldn’t, he just told me to go to the patrol shack and wait. Anyways, I was with him for those last 6 months, but I curled up in a ball and did nothing to try to make his doctors do anything or find alternative treatment options like the Mayo clinic. I just curled up in a ball of fear and anxiety and did nothing. I was just paralyzed. My dad would have gone to the ends of the earth for me, and I didn’t even try to save him. I don’t know how to live with that.