They started him on radiation to shrink whatever was growing and it did. Chemo was to follow and he only received one treatment. Toward the end of the radiation treatments, he had trouble eating and he started getting weak. On his very last treatment, he was so weak they hospitalized him. They did all sorts of tests to see why he couldn't eat which showed nothing. The later consensus was that the radiation had scarred his esophagus so he couldn't swallow more than a bite or two before he felt like gagging. Eventually they decided to tube feed him. If I had it to do over again and had a choice, I wouldn't have allowed it. It kept him alive but set off a series of side effects..first a stomach infection..diarrhea that left him so sore that he couldn't sit and when they left him in a chair for hours, he refused to get out of bed. Gangrene in his foot from diabetes and lack of circulation from not moving. They wanted to amputate his foot which he refused and sepsis set in which was the ultimate cause of his death, not the cancer. There is no doubt that either his cancer or the quadruple bypass they discovered he needed would have ended his life but in hindsight what time he had left would have been much better if we had done nothing. It all started with a one-time dizzy spell, nothing more. He wasn't in any pain or discomfort or anything else that would have brought him to the doctor. We thought the dizzy spell was brought on by his diabetes and that perhaps his medication needed to be changed.
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