A Broken Leg

Saying goodbye after the Christmas trip wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I think because of how normal and healthy my dad seemed. He did not seem sick at all, and given that the full cranial radiation was done and he had started his 1st chemo treatment, I think I was expecting my dad to be around for a good while and for the treatment to really work. After all, so many cancer patients are in treatment for years! I thought my dad would be one of them. He was so determined and did everything the Doctors asked of him and was gaining weight because of all the protein shakes he was drinking haha. I think he thought he could control the cancer and not, in his words, 'look like a cancer patient' and get really thin and frail looking. He thought if he was healthy and beefed up, it would help his cancer go away.
What also helped was that I already had a plane flight home booked for the end of January/beginning of February for my baby shower that was planned on Feb 4th. So knowing I was coming home again in about 3.5 weeks, it was easier to say goodbye and 'see you soon!'
In just those 3 short weeks I was gone, my sister had called me early one morning because my mom had called... my dad broke his leg. I was so surprised to hear that my dad broke his leg. How in the world did that happen?? Apparently he broke his femur clean through, completely in half. It was on the leg that his knee pain was on and the pain had been radiating up his leg since shortly after I left after Christmas. He was in his closet, putting his pants on... went to step in with one leg and the other one broke right out from under him and he collapsed. The femur is the strongest bone in the body, so for it to break, just from him getting dressed, is unheard of.
The orthopedic surgeon put a rod in my dad's leg, so he didn't even need a cast. While she was in there she took a biopsy of his bone marrow because in her expertise, she said the only thing that can break a femur bone the way it had, short of a major accident, is cancer. She was 100% sure there was cancer in his bone, and that's why it broke clean in half without any force being put onto the leg. The biopsy came back, and she was right. She had looked up his previous bone scan and saw a hot spot.. right where he had broken his leg. He didn't have what his Doctor had said it was: 'osteoarthropathy'. The cancer had spread to the bone, but at the time of the bone scan, it wasn't too clear, so his Doctor had overlooked it.
From that moment on, my dad's attitude had changed. Like I said before, it spreading to his bone was his dooms day. Not only had he just learned that the cancer was in his lung, brain and bone, but he had also broken his leg and couldn't walk without a walker. Even with that, he was slow and could barely get around, and it was hurting and tiring. Exhausting. He had to get a hospital bed put in his trophy room downstairs and from that moment on, he would never see the upstairs again. He was limited to the downstairs of the house and even then, it was difficult to move around freely. He started getting depressed and it was hard for me and my sister to reach him because he didn't feel like talking. We relied on my mom for updates.