There's No Place Like Home

Last night dad said he was hoping to go home on Tuesday or Wednesday.  I told him that it lined up pretty well with my guess that he would be going home by around Thursday.  As it turns out, we were both wrong:  Dr. Flam just signed the discharge papers.

Doc Dave is going home today.

It is such great news.  There are dozens of little details that we will need to take care of in the next few hours and days, but they all seem trivially easy compared to the battle my dad just waged and won.

Dad's war with Merkel Cell Carcinoma continues, and every battle he fights shows his courage and serves as an example and inspiration to me.  It should come as no surprise that we discussed how to proceed with dignity and comfort should this battle have gone badly, and dad's ability to initiate that blunt and difficult discussion speaks to his inner strength.

I realize I paid very good attention to how my dad interacted with my grandfather when my grandfather was ill, because I had a rich reservoir of observations to model my care taking behavior on.  When I face a serious illness, as we all eventually do, I now have a heroic fighter to model my response to illness on as well.

There is a story they used to tell students on their first day at Harvard Law, and I suspect I'll tell it a bit wrong.  My recollection is this:  Two hunters are sleeping in their tent in the woods.  An enormous bear comes crashing through the forest and roars.  One hunter starts putting on his shoes.  The other, still barefoot, says "Why are putting on shoes?  You can't outrun the bear!"  The first hunter says "I don't need to outrun the bear.  I just need to outrun you."

Of interest is that my dad considered himself stage IV on November 24, 2010.  According to his post last year, he had only about a 25% chance of being alive today, and some people in fact do outrun and eventually survive the bear.  Every new day that my dad outruns the MCC is a victory we will celebrate.

On a practical note, my dad is surely going to be exhausted for the next few days and will be very unlikely to take visitors or phone calls.  The transition from hospital to home is one that we will all need to focus on.