This, from another dear, dear friend. I have cried during this saga, but never from anger or pain or sorrow. I have only shed tears of joy over the deep kindness and love that I've been showered with since it all started. This was one of those moments. And look at the photo take by my friend of her father with her daughter and the painting he made of it,
Here it is:
I wanted to share my father’s “miracle” story with you.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2001, just before the birth of Kate. He was 76. We were living in the UK and dealing with young children and my (very large!) third trimester, so I couldn’t travel and got by with a combination of prayers and numbing myself, trying to prepare for what seemed like the inevitable. He was a doctor, and it was always him, calmly describing the procedures and treatments and reassuring each of his six kids that he was ok. Never have I met anyone as stoic as he was.
He had the Whipple surgery early that summer and it was touch and go forward a while. We flew from London to Cape Cod and met my sister and her family so I could take baby Kate to Los Angeles to meet her grandparents…and possibly to say goodbye to my father. ( I took this photo of him feeding Kate her bottle and in he made a painting of it as he was recovering.).
And he did recover. It was slow and painful and required a lot of adjustments; living without a pancreas is not easy. But he grew stronger and stronger and as the year, then years passed, we came to the slow realization that he was cured!
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, I was so terrified and wondered how he had been so brave and calm. One day, I asked him how he did it, what was his secret, and he said “I always felt it in my body that I would survive. There was not a single day that I woke up and thought I was not ok. “. I’m not sure where that came from, but I uploaded that to the hard drive and thought of it every morning. (I guess I still do!).
My father passed away in March of this year, at the age of 97. His heart stopped working well , but he lived fully engaged and optimistic and rarely spoke about his death defying story.
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