A day at the zoo
When you go to a Zoo, you pay entrance and you are so kind to pay for food to feed the animals.
Opposite today: Our at lunch visitors: free entry, no food…
Today’s cancer story…
We had some brothers and sisters from father on a visit. Saying: oh nice, you are all eating together… Now the hospitality in fathers house has always been: who enters during lunch or dinner eats with us.
Yet what made mom’s blood cooking was: oh nice, you are all eating together.
Looks nice if you don’t see that:
- father woke mom up from 3 to 5 am and from 7 to 9 am (not to listen to fathers talking but to follow his every step as he is so weak that he stumbles at night)
- last time sister came she started rambling about her health, the health of her husband, the health of her brother and after all that asking: by the way how is fathers health? As if any disease is worse than cancer, let alone they have any clue what a metastatic liver cancer is.
Mom must now be the bad one as she carried on looking at father and no extra coffee, tea nor lunch got served. Hmmm, that could explain why the visitors left so fast…
How to visit people in palliative care
- if the cancer’s patient’s mind is not in this world, don’t visit for chitchat
- don’t go during meals: the are givers already have their hands full with cooking and feeding the sick person, so bring your own food 🙂
- bring something useful to make up for the "time" lost when the care-givers have to focus attention on you-the visitor- and not on the person who really needs all the care he can get!
- if palliative care givers or patients could be asleep (which can be any time during the day if the nights were fully awake), don’t keep on ringing the bell or banging the doors
- just phone who you want to visit first and ask when you can come, and what to expect
Palliative Symptoms
Palliative metastatic liver cancer is ugly, and it’s not because of the metastatic liver cancer, its because of the "palliative symptoms". We hear similar palliative stories from people that have been in the same boat, yet with another disease than metastatic liver cancer.