Christmas

The trip home for Christmas was both wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time. We came home planning to absorb everything about my dad and Christmas with him. His attitude was amazing and he was still the same old guy. So optimistic and jokingly told us all about his scary radiation treatments and the mask that he had to wear while they did it. Of course he made friends with the entire radiation staff and was actually sad to leave them when his treatment was done... Only my dad!!
He had started to develop some knee pain in between his initial diagnosis on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It had gotten progressively worse and they had added morphine to his medication list that included decadron for the brain swelling. It would relieve the pain somewhat, but the morphine dosage kept having to be increased. When the Doctor looked into all of his pain, he ordered a bone scan to try and see if he could figure out what all this pain was from.
My dad was so nervous about the bone scan because he was scared the cancer would have spread to his bone, and for him, that was his dooms day.  He felt he could handle the cancer in his lung and brain, but if it was also in his bone, he would feel defeated. When the scan came back and the Doctor said he was clear and it just looked like some osteoarthropathy, he was jumping for joy! He felt renewed and refreshed and felt like he could handle the pain, if he knew it wasn't cancer. The osteoarthropathy wasn't cancer, but it was cancer related. Somehow the cancer was feeding on areas where he already had some arthritis, therefore causing a lot of pain. Me, my mom and sister did think it was weird though, that his knee was in pain, but his shoulder wasn't... he had worse arthritis in his shoulder, so if the cancer was just worsening the areas he had some arthritis in, it seemed weird it would be in his knee, but nowhere else.
He was a trooper and tried to keep on a good regimen to control his pain, because it was getting progressively worse. One thing he looked forward to was us coming home for Christmas and going on the Napa Valley Wine Train on Christmas Eve which he was so excited about. :)