I focused back on getting a job because it was getting increasingly harder to pay the bills out of my savings and especially when we engaged a maid to help my mum out with chores. After two months of my mum with my maid, the constant complaint about the maid was driving me crazy. Thankfully, my father decided to discharge himself out of hospital because there was nothing they can do for him.
The maid showed her usefulness by helping to wheel my father to meet his friends while my mum do the cooking and preparing the medicine. The maid also helped my father to go toilet at night so both of us can sleep. To me, this was the period when we needed the extra pair of hands.
For the first week when my father came back, I arranged for the home hospice care to commence. The palliative nurse came and decided to bring the palliative doctor on the second visit. The doctor told us it seemed my father still didn’t know (actually he has been told before by the surgeons) that there were no more solutions and he had to face death (of course, they said it in an indirect manner).
I decided to seek my father’s chemotherapy doctor’s help by asking him if he could spare a session to meet my father. It was tough but we need to drive this message to him. After coming back from the session, my father just told me: “The doctor told me I am going to die. No more help.” It seemed a little heartless to break this news repeatedly to him. But I firmly felt that one should know, accept the fact that his/her days are numbered so that they can move on to accept the results emotionally and mentally. My father resumed his smoking which he stopped for close to a year, but we let him be.
The palliative nurse’s regular visits helped us tremendously by teaching the maid how to take care of the wound (so my mum and her could take turns) and improve her caregiving skills. I could focus on my work and earn money which I badly needed now, with a house to renovate next year.
I am thinking of bringing my venerable to talk to my father be it in hospice or home so that death is less frightening for my father. Other than that, I think pretty much my work is done. I have accepted the fact that I will welcome 2019 mostly likely without my father.