My Story is about my dad, Don Anderson

 

This event took place from 6/01/2014 to 5/13/2015

 

The Discovery

June 1, 2014 my healthy 53 year old daddy had his first pain. The night before, he played in a garage band with a couple of his buddies and they had a great night playing for friends. Absolutely nothing was wrong. That changed in an instant. At the ED, we heard the words that changed our lives forever “a mass on the pancreas”. The hospital took a biopsy and didn’t get any positive cells so they said they had mistakenly diagnosed this and it was pancreatitis. They sent him home with suggestions on how to prevent flair ups. In the 3 months after that, he was in pain on and off where they diagnosed him with diabetes, did multiple ERCPs and a total of 7 tests before getting a positive cell.

This is My Story

At the end of August 2014, my boyfriend walked into my parents’ house to ask for my hand in marriage about 5 minutes after the doctor called him to deliver the news of the positive cells. We traveled back to Duke to meet with the surgeon with a surgery date 3 weeks away. September 10, 2014, my dad had the Whipple surgery done and a vein resection also had to be done. The surgeon told us the tumor was large and aggressive, adenocarcinoma. The surgeon told us there was a 90% chance, he would not make it. When this news was told to my dad, his response was I have a 10% chance. I can do this. He set the record for the fastest discharge after a Whipple at Duke. September 28, 2014, I got engaged and I knew I wanted to quickly get married because of his diagnosis. Friday, November 14, 2014 the day before my wedding, my mom called me and said my dad’s surgical incision had split open overnight and they were at Duke and his surgical oncology team wanted him to be admitted. It was important to my dad to be at my wedding, unfortunately I think we all knew what was ahead for him. They temporarily patched him up and sent him house with strict orders to come back to the hospital on Monday morning. We got married on November 15, 2014 and in the 2 months from my dad’s surgery to my wedding day, he lost so much weight and began to look so weak.
The radiation left him in so much pain and the chemotherapy pill that he took caused him nausea and vomiting daily. March 2015, the ascites started and my dad started going to the hospital twice a week to get it drained. We knew this was bad but we didn’t give up fighting for him and with him. By April 2015, he was so weak he could barely walk and he went back to the hospital where they admitted him and eventually sent him home on hospice. A former college football player, 54 years old now on his death bed. We watched him waste away into nothing but bones.  My brother, my mom, my husband, and I spent every day soaking up every moment we could with him. On May 13, 2015 my husband and I closed on our first home and I immediately went back to my parents’ house when we were finished. Less than an hour later, my daddy peacefully passed away with my mom, my brother, the hospice nurse, and myself by his side. 6 days before that, I asked him if he was ever scared through any of this. He told me no and that’s why having a strong faith is important. He told he was tired and he was ready to go. He told me all he ever wanted in life was to be a good husband, a good father, and a good provider. I assured him he had reached all his goals. He told me one day I was going to be a good mom. I found out I was pregnant 2 weeks later and my daughter which would have been my dad’s first grandchild was born exactly 8 months after he passed. My brother is now married to my dad’s hospice nurse. In the next 5 years, my dad’s 4 grandchildren were born. I have two girls and my brother a boy and a girl. We watched our dad be a father figure to so many people and he loved his friend’s grandchildren so much, it is devastating that pancreatic cancer took being a grandparent away from him. Losing my dad at 24 years old shifted my life in a way I will never recover from. My brother and I have each suffered with mental health struggles in the years since his death. Pancreatic cancer took the strongest man we have ever known and who we counted on.

The Impact of Time

If we just had more time, I wouldn’t have lost my dad less than 6 months after I was married. If we just had more time, I wouldn’t have planned my dad’s funeral at 24 years old. If we just had more time, he would have got to meet his first grandchild, my daughter, born exactly eight months after he passed away. If we just had more time, he would have been able to retire and live out his dream of moving to the beach.