I remember Pete............he was a good kid.....part 2 posted 9/22/2008 1:07:05 AM | 6 kudos what's this?     report abuse

kywonder

Surgery was scheduled and I went to UK to be with him. If he was frightened, he never let it show, but I knew he was. After all he had only turned 28 a little over a month before he was hospitalized. This was in February of '87' and his birthday was in Jan.

We gave Pete our best wishes, and left as they wheeled him down to surgery. Time seemed to completely come to a standstill as we watched the clock ticking, wondering when the doctor would come back out and give us some news. One hour went by, two......then three.....and still no word. The longer we waited, the worse the fear became. Four ...... five hours later the page came that we could go visit with the doctor, Pete was in recovery.

The smile on the doctor's face was the best news we could ask for as he made his way to where we where. Yes it was cancer, extremely rare and the fastest growing kind there was. It had gotten 94% of it. Expectancy of life was 2 years without normal cancer treatment and 5 years if he could get a pill from Silicone Valley. So we opted for the pill. With the pill, the procedure would be to do surgery once again when the pill came in and just drop it directly on the cancer. We finally got to go see Pete and I never will forget the tears that ran down my face as I saw my baby brother laying there with that huge halo screwed into his head. I wanted to pick him up in my arms and rub and soothe away the pain from the awful headache he. For he felt closer than a brother, he had lived with me and my husband for many years.

It would be a month before the hospital was able to get the pill to put directly on the cancers. In the mean time, radiation and chemotherapy was started on Pete and he became even more frail as he lost weight from the effects of the treatment. Many nights I would lay beside him in his bed at the hospital and wash his bony little legs and arms, after which I would put lotions on him to soothe the dry itchy skin from the radiation. He would laugh as his blond curly hair would come out in handfuls.

Oh the infamous day of the arrival of the pill. Cat scans and whatever else they needed were taken of Pete's brain to determine where would be the best place to open to drop the pill on his brain. We were in shock when the doctors came back with the reply that there would be no more surgery, the cancers had already grew back to twice the size of what they had taken off. This was when we learned about his cancers growing at an extremely fast speed. There was nothing else we could do. We watched as he grew steadily worse and went into a coma and had to be put on life support. But mom was not willing to let him go. Watching him suffer through the torment of the life support was very hard on mom. Prayers were going up around the clock and Pete took a turn for the better and came out of ICU and got to come home.

What he did not tell mom or the other members of the family was that he was going blind from the growth of the cancer. He just did not want to see mom suffer any more. Pete made his way to church on a hospital bed. His dying wish was he would live long enough to get his soul right. Things steadily got worse for Pete, hallucinations set in, he dressed in sweat pants and cowboy boots, which we knew were not Pete. He would have been mortified to know that he had cowboy boots on with his sweatpants. But it was the effect of the cancer.

Pete would only make it to June '87' before the cancer would finally get the best of him. But what a trooper, he never complained of pain. The only way we knew he was hurting was the little "em..em...em...em" that we would hear from time to time. When it got so bad the doctors told us he could go into a coma and stay like that for days or weeks, or he would go into a coma and just peacefully slip on out into eternity. Since mom had decided that she would never put him back on life support (because of the extreme suffering he went through), we prayed that he would just go to sleep and pass away peacefully. We knew it was time when he started saying stuff that made absolutely no sense and he started seeing things in the room. Over in one corner was my dead father, over in another corner were angels.....we told him to go... .go Pete..... go where daddy is ...and go where angels trod . So Pete peacefully and quietly slipped out of this life to be free of a body that was wracked with pain and mishaps ........But oh God, how I still miss him!!!!!!

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