{"id":363,"date":"2005-12-22T07:19:59","date_gmt":"2005-12-22T12:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/?p=363"},"modified":"2005-12-22T07:19:59","modified_gmt":"2005-12-22T12:19:59","slug":"the-best-we-could-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/2005\/12\/the-best-we-could-do\/","title":{"rendered":"The best we could do"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Aunt L. finally faced up to the decision that my uncle is too weak and too debilitated for radiation and chemo. She asked him late last week in one of his more lucid periods, and even with several brain tumors (and there are several) his lucid periods are a lot more lucid than the best of most of us without a brain tumor, to think about radiation and what he wanted. He said he wanted to go home. It also doesn’t help that Monday’s MRI shows that one of the small “lesions” in the back has gotten significantly bigger since they went in and did the biopsy on the big one<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My mother and her sister, Aunt M.T., have been down there since Sunday and will be home tomorrow. It pains me that I couldn’t help my aunt get to this place, that I couldn’t help him get home. Aunt M.T. says that Aunt L. really needed to hear from his sisters that it was OK to skip the radiation, that the path we followed with my grandmother wasn’t necessarily the right path for him. That makes sense, I suppose, after all I am just a kid, right?<\/p>\n

So he is home now, set up in the rented hospital bed with the oxygen tank and looked after by hospice care workers and my Aunt L. It seems selfish to sit here and wait when I could be down there (TGF<\/acronym> would probably understand if I skipped out after Christmas but she wouldn’t like it much), but I’m not entirely sure I have the strength to be there.<\/p>\n

And what would I do anyway but be in the way? If he doesn’t know I love him by now then telling him in the last few weeks of his life isn’t going to do much good. My mother is convinced he won’t see the new year, and my mother is the ultimate pragmatist. <\/p>\n

No matter when it happens, at least he is at home now where he wanted to be all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Aunt L. finally faced up to the decision that my uncle is too weak and too debilitated for radiation and chemo. She asked him late last week in one of his more lucid periods, and even with several brain tumors (and there are several) his lucid periods are a lot more lucid than the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-363","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-thoughts","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}