Seven Years

I’ve never been one for plagiarism but I do firmly believe that, if you’re going to rip off, you should rip off only from the best.  So when I received John’s email today with the subject header, "Seven Years," I could not resist the temptation to lift the title.  It was at 1:15 a.m. (exactly four minutes ago as I am writing this) on Wednesday morning December 23, 2004 that Dad breathed his last, seven years ago at this hour.
    Dad had been diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (aka CLL) 26 months before that.  CLL we were told at the outset was deadly, having no treatment, let alone a cure.  That was the bad news.  The good news, and it was very good news, is that of all the cancers it was by far the slowest progressing, so slow it generally took the better part of 20 years to kill you.  Since Dad was already 87 years young at the time of the diagnosis, his oncologist Dr. Roman Franklin said he would almost certainly die of something else before the leukemia caught up with him.  He could still fully look forward to living out his natural life span, and there wouldn’t even be any symptoms until the end.
 
    The leukemia had only been discovered strictly by a fluke.  Dad had taken mother for a routine appointment with her internist Dr. Bober.  When Bober came out to the reception area to say hello to Dad, she commented that he looked pale and immediately had him go to the lab for a blood test.  Sure enough, the test raised enough flags to send him to Franklin who finally judged his condition to be leukemia.  If Dr. Bober hadn’t come out to greet him that day, we would probably have never known. 
    For two years, Dad went in for routine blood work and everything always came back status quo, no deterioration at all.  Exactly two years to the week after the diagnosis, I came home at 2 a.m. from a theater outing in Ann Arbor.  It was Saturday October 25th 2004 and Dad had been bleeding profusely all evening.  He had had attacks of bleeding for years due to his prostate cancer, but never this much this quickly.  These bleeds we were told were quite harmless and completely common side effects of the radiation treatments he had taken for his cancer in the 1990s.  When I got home, he had finally stanched the bloodletting.  I was hoping this was just more of the same.  These attacks always came in spurts.  I was hoping this was the end of it for a few more weeks.  We both went to bed but I told him if he had another bleeding episode during the night, we would go right to Emergency.
    At 6 a.m. he woke me to say he had been bleeding again for almost an hour.  He had stopped it now but we’d better get to the hospital before it starts again.  So we got right in the car and took him in.  Our worst fears materialized.  The bleeding wasn’t from the radiation treatments at all.  It was the leukemia.  Instead of taking 20 years to flare up, it had taken two. 
    Nonetheless, they now had treatments and he was put on an aggressive regimen for which he was in the hospital until nearly Thanksgiving, for they could not send him home until his platelets got up to a certain level.  Otherwise, if he started bleeding again at home, he could bleed to death this time in the 20 minutes it would take us to get him back to the hospital.  He was home for two weeks, managed to celebrate his 89th birthday on December 10th. 
     The next day it was back to Emergency when the visiting nurse saw his ulcerated legs and concluded his legs were infected.  I tried telling her that was impossible.  His legs were ulcerated because of the chemo, I told her.  We had been to the doctor three times that week with his legs looking much worse than they did now and neither the doctors nor the nurses ever mentioned infection.  But this nurse was adamant.  She quite strictly insisted his legs were infected and made us go to Emergency.  Just as I suspected, the ER doctors took one look at him and said, "Of course there’s no infection.  Those ulcers are from the chemo."  But it was a routine procedure to do a chest X-ray on anyone Dad’s age.  After the X-Ray, they would send him back home with me.  Then the X-ray came back.  There was just a pinprick of pneumonia on his lungs.  Now he had to be admitted long enough to resolve the pneumonia which, in his very weakened condition from the chemo, would surely be deadly in a few days if not treated at once. 
    It was then that nature took a very cruel course and put us between a rock and a hard place.  His leukemia was flaring up and now he had pneumonia.  He needed to finish his chemo, but the chemo would only make the pneumonia worse.  And the antibiotics would turbo charge the leukemia.  The doctors had to choose to treat the threat that stood the most immediate chance of killing him.  They treated the pneumonia.  Then nature dealt the cruelest cards of all.  The pneumonia turned out to be a super-bug that was quite resistant to antibiotics.  It took them nearly ten days to identify the antibiotic that would prove effective. 
    But they did find it and it did work.  The pneumonia was going away.  On Sunday, December 20th, Dr. Franklin came in to Dad’s ICU and gave us all a glowing report.  The blood tests on the leukemia were all negative now.  The chemo had worked, the leukemia was gone.  Now they just had to lick the bug and, after about six month of rehab in a nursing home, Dad would have more years of quality life.  Lourdes Nursing Home even reserved a suite for us that Mom and Dad could share so they could be together during his rehab.  Everything looked very promising. 
    Then, just a couple hours later, I observed the nurses receiving Dad’s latest blood tests that had just been taken that day.  I asked to see them and noticed something quite alarming.  His platelets were dropping again!  Precipitously again!  I asked about it only to be told that I would have to talk to Dr. Franklin.  Over the next 36 hours I called Franklin repeatedly only to be told each time that he could not come to the phone.  On Monday afternoon, I got a hold of Bober who told me that the leukemia had come back gangbusters.  He had been in remission for only a few days.  This time things were next to hopeless.  In the next 24 hours, there were a couple of last ditch things they were going to try but it wasn’t likely they would work.  We should prepare ourselves. 
    The next morning I went to the funeral home to inform them we might be having a death in the next few days.  During the half hour that I was at the funeral home, the whole world changed.  When I pulled into the driveway at home, I did not even get a chance to park the car.  Tim and Elizabeth immediately came out and said Dad had already almost died twice that morning.  They were keeping him alive just long enough so we could say goodbye, but we had to go to the hospital immediately.  We each had our goodbyes, first individually, then as a family.  Dad could not speak, too weak even to open his eyes, but the nurses said he was conscious, knew we were there and could understand us. 
     I told Dad that I would not let the world forget him.  I was going to recover from my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and I was going to get my MBA and film careers going again.  I was going to start a charitable foundation that I would call The Richard and Ruth Grogan Memorial Foundation and that I would set it up to exist in perpetuity so that for decades to come worthy causes would be financed and the world would know that The Richard Grogan Foundation was making it all possible. 
    I think he understood.  I hope he understood.  He kept grunting as if desperately trying to tell me that he understood.  When we got together at his bedside as a family, someone told him that it was I who was holding his left hand.  He immediately squeezed and squeezed hard.  That was a treasured moment.  After a while, I felt like I might be monopolizing him so when I felt him loosen his grip, I tried to gently pull away so someone else could hold his hand.  He immediately pulled my hand back and squeezed hard again.   That is a memory I will cherish for the rest of my life. 
    The hospital chaplain gave him Last Rites and, at 3:15 p.m., we disconnected his respirator.  He was fully sedated and quite comfortable.  The nurse said that taking off the respirator would be the equivalent of holding a pillow over his face.  His oxygen would go to near zero within a minute or so and he would die easily within 15 minutes.  Well, my father had lived his whole life on the philosophy that anything worth doing was worth doing well.  He was determined that he was even going to die well, fighting to the last.  He persisted for another ten hours, finally expiring at 1:15 a.m.   As Fr. Vin would later say at his Christmas Mass homily, if he died at 1:15 a.m., surely he was already in heaven at 1:16.
    So as a memorial to him on this seventh anniversary of his death, I am presenting this recollection of what I went through.  Hopeful til the end, as late as Sunday afternoon, I fully expected a complete recovery.  Even as late as Tuesday morning, I was hoping one of these last ditch treatments would work.  The bad part was that there wasn’t adequate time to prepare, as if one could ever be prepared for this.  The good part of all this was, it happened so quickly there was no time to feel bad.  Once he was gone, of course, my executor duties became so intense that there was still no time to feel bad.  I wasn’t at liberty to start allowing myself to feel pain until weeks later.  Then, for the next two years, the pain was very bad, weeping every day, would give anything to have just 15 more minutes with him.  The pain is still with me, but gets better with each passing year.  Five years ago, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to enjoy Christmas again.  I’m still not sure I’ll ever be able to, but it is getting better. 
    John sent one of his fave pics of Dad in today’s email.  So below, as my tribute to the Seven Year mark, are a few of my favorite photos of Dad that I took during the last few years of his life. 

Mom's 88th birthday party, one of my favorite portraits of our parents, the Grogan "American Gothic." 

Dad admiring the world's largest model railroad in Owosso, MI

Dad in heaven in Owosso railroad museum, our last Father's Day

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Dad's favorite picture in front of the 1225 locomotive, used in film "Polar Express," kept this next to his hospital bed. 

57th wedding anniversary, still in love

The proud father of the groom

Tickled pink by #1 son's fiance