Before everything started, my dad had normal complications like epilepsy, high blood pressure and diabetes. But that didn't keep him from doing what he loved the most: being surrounded with computers. He was a computer technician certified by Microsoft which means he had a lot of talent in him. He also worked in Nunavut which is the province at the north of Canada where there is no sun for like a month during winter and sun 24/7 for a month in summer. He was working for the their government. He had to come back home when he started to feel not well. That was about 7 to 8 years ago. His kidneys were starting to shut down on him. That's when he was diagnosed with kidney malfunction.
At first, the kidney may seem like an organ that doesn't do much for the body. But I was myself surprised. Without kidneys, everything that you consume that has liquids will stay in your body. So let's say for example you drink alcohol and you get drunk but you don't have kidneys to excrete the alcohol, you will stay drunk. Lucky for my dad, they were still working but he still needed to follow a treatment that consisted to pass a saline solution in his kidneys. For that treatment he needed a catheter in his stomach. With that he could still have a normal life and travel since we could transport his little machine for the treatment.
After maybe a year or two, his kidneys stopped working. He now had to do the full treatment which is called Hemodialysis. This treatment consists in cleaning the blood of the body because the kidneys can’t do it anymore. His catheter in the abdomen was removed and a new one was installed on the upper chest. The catheter was attached to a big artery so the blood could go in and out of his body in a tube, into an artificial kidney, cleaned in the artificial kidney and back into his body. He started doing the treatment 3 times a week at the hospital. Each treatment is about 4 to 5 hours. The treatment given at the hospital is a treatment that is really hard on the body and you feel very weak after the treatment. Being tired of always going to the hospital, he started to do the treatment at home. A lot of work had to be done with the master bedroom that was converted into a hospital room with two machines that would take care of that dialysis. My mom couldn't sleep in the room anymore. So we made a bedding area in the living room for her to sleep.
There weren’t many people in Montreal that had the machine at home. When he started, he was only the second person in the area. The treatment at home was done over night (8 hours of treatment) and it was 6 days a week. We could see that he was less weak and that he had more energy than doing the treatment at the hospital. The only disadvantage is that he couldn’t travel anymore and had to be home by 8 to start preparing. After a few years, he started the treatment with an artificial artery in the arm. It consists to a tube in your left arm and you use a big needle to go in the arm to do the treatment. It was a safer and healthier way to do the treatment since he didn’t have an open wound like it was with the catheter. The only disadvantage with the artificial artery is that after a year or so, it becomes hard to do the treatment because the artificial artery is all used up and a new artificial artery needs to be put in. The surgery to take out an old tube is quite dangerous because the patient could bleed to death. So the old tube was left there and the new one was place at another area on the arm.
And then suddenly, last year, when we thought everything was going on a right track, my dad started to do blood transfusions because his red blood cells were too low. After doing the bone marrow test, we were told that he was starting to do leukemia. Since it was just the beginning there was hope for a cure. So we started to do treatment immediately. The cancer was so small that chemo wasn’t needed. But the treatment wasn’t effective. He started to need platelet transfusion too. Now his blood was getting as thin as water which was very dangerous. The slightest poke gave him a bruise the size of a golf ball.
Another bone marrow test was needed. We were told that if his leukemia got worse, that he was given two years. If not, around 10 years he should live. When the results came out, it didn’t look good but a new treatment that just came out could help him. That treatment was a type of chemo. The treatment was only five days straight which consisted to destroy the entire immune system to rebuilt it afterward. That treatment was probably the worse one my dad ever went through. The treatment had to be stopped because he got really sick. But the thing is that that treatment needs to be done 5 days in a row without interruption or else it needs to be done all over again. He finally succeeded to finish the treatment after two weeks. Now the only thing was that we have to wait for the immune system to destroy itself. While waiting, my dad was back at the treatment at the hospital because of the low amount of platelets in his body. Doing the treatment with the artificial catheter was very dangerous for him in his condition. So he had to go back with the catheter treatment.
It was only at mid September that my dad got an pneumonia. Even with medication, it was getting worse. The week before he died, we were told that only a year was left for him. Two days after that, he got in the hospital by emergency because he fell off his bed. When I went to visit him at the hospital, he had an obvious black eye. The hospital had to keep him because his lungs were filling up with liquid very fast. We didn’t know if it was water or blood.Taking him to take X-rays was hard because a single movement was giving him bruises.
I still remember his face the last time I saw him. It was like yesterday that I hold him in my arms and told him that I loved him very much and he told me that he wanted to eat a hamburger. It was his way of telling me that everything was ok and not to worry about anything. He took his last breathe on October 16th at 5:30am. He was incinerated like he wished to be. Even though we were told and we all knew that it was coming one day or the other, it was a very hard moment. Sometimes, I still think that he’s alive and living with us, but just not home. . .
A little area that I have for him in my room
Picture taken a month before his death
For me he was my hero, because after all he went through, he would still smile and enjoy his life like any other person. Every time I meet someone that has the same problems of my dad, I tell them his story and I try to help them. My family and I are now supporting the Kidney Foundation of Canada to help others in that are in the same situation as us.
If you can relate to what I’ve just told here, the best thing to do is keep your head high, smile and be positive.
I love you dad and I miss you
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