Back at the start of November, my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumour, at the time the doctors didn’t know exactly what it was, but after a few more scans and tests they realised it was glioblastoma, which we were told was incurable due to its position in my dad’s brain and very aggressive. Maybe it was me being naive, but I just brushed aside all the medical advice about just how serious his illness was. We brought him back home at the end of November and just tried to carry on as normal (or as normal as caring for a terminally ill family member could be). December was quite challenging as my dad’s personality became more demanding and forgetful, but we all just carried on as normal. Then mid- January came and it was like we had a different dad. The cancer affected his brain so dramatically that he was forgetting things/people, his already limited motor skills worsened to the stage he couldn’t even use his motorised wheelchair anymore, it felt like he was becoming a prisoner trapped in his own body. Me and my mom were constantly there to care for him, so watching him deteriorate so rapidly became harder to deal with. Start of February came round and we felt like maybe my dad would last another month or 2 (bearing in mind the doctors said that without treatment, 3 months is an average life span for someone with glioblastoma) so February was the 3rd month since diagnosis. We put him to bed on Thursday the 7th, and he sort of slipped in to a deep sleep, he wasn’t in a coma and he wasn’t unconscious, but he just couldn’t wake up. His last few days were unbearable to watch. He passed away at home with all of our family around him at 11:49pm on Monday the 11th February. It hasn’t even been a week yet, but I think now I know he’s gone forever, and there’s no more caring for him, no more district nurses or Hospice nurses coming round, it’s starting to settle in, and all of the events of the last 3 months and 9 days, from diagnosis to his death, has just hit me like a steam train. I’m trying to stay strong for my family, but in 3 months our entire lives have been turned upside down and ripped apart. I keep on thinking maybe if I knew the symptoms we could have caught the cancer sooner and he’d still be here today, but I know that inevitably we’d still be where we are now. I just keep having these moments where I’m fine one minute, laughing and remembering the good times, then the next I genuinely feel nothing. I don’t feel sad or angry or anything, just numb inside. I just don’t understand how I’ll ever get through this, he really was the best dad I could ever have wished for, and knowing I’ll never see him again is heartbreaking. Sorry that this was such a long post but I’ve just got so much on my mind I don’t even know where to begin and how to deal with my dad’s death
