JOUR1111: Factual Storytelling Exercise

What would you do if you were told you had just two years to live? This is the question facing my dad, Brenton, who was recently hit with the news that his life expectancy had suddenly been cut to 2-4 years.

Brenton was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2004 at the age of 45. Prostate cancer is usually an ‘older man’s’ disease, with an average age of 70 years at diagnosis. Since then he has undergone surgery, biopsies, radiotherapy and been prescribed multiple drugs in a bid to keep the disease at bay. Whilst some of this treatment initially proved promising, the disease has now spread to his bones and become metastatic. Brenton is now entering the palliative phase of his treatment.

Palliative treatment is a term despised by sufferers of any disease. It means that doctors have given up on an actual cure, and are now focussed on buying time, making the patient as comfortable as possible and treating symptoms, rather than treating the disease. This is the point a patient is normally given their ‘life sentence’.

Since Brenton was ‘sentenced’, he has found it difficult to control his thoughts, which he has placed in three basic categories: the logistics of dying; past memories; and what he is going to miss.

The logistics should be the easiest of the three; it’s a cold and emotionless thing to start investigating how to change all bank accounts into his wife’s’ name, but that list is never ending. It includes the house, insurance, mobile phones, internet accounts, water, electricity, car leasing and so on. He needs to dig out his superannuation and life insurance details and make a few calls. This should be easy, but he hasn’t started. When he begins thinking about it, his mind wanders to where he would like his ashes spread.

 Brenton is finding it difficult to direct his thoughts away from his memories and what he believes he will miss out on. He believes his life had been divided into two distinct periods. Not ‘pre-cancer’ and ‘post-cancer’ as might be assumed, but the period prior to meeting Allison, his wife-to-be, and the period since then. Whilst pre-Allison memories sometimes bubble to the top, it is the memories since meeting her which dominate his mind.

The greatest day of his life was not his wedding day, or the birth of his children, but of his first date with Allison. Despite a poor choice of movie, it ended with their first kiss, and he clearly recalls whooping and hollering the whole way home.

The most defining moment of his life was their second date. It didn’t start well, with the relationship one doorbell ring away from ending before it began. Fortunately Brenton managed to drag himself and his hangover out of bed to answer the door. What followed was his total honesty about everything – something never before shared with anyone.  He realised right then that Allison was ‘the one’.

Pouring over old photo albums has become a favourite past-time. Holiday photos, wedding photos, honey-moon snaps and photos of his two sons from birth until the present are now firmly etched in his brain, but he knows he will drag them out again and again over the next few years.

The thought of dying is not what scares Brenton the most. While it is often a dark cloud hanging over his mind, he is more terrified of the months immediately leading up to his death, and the years that will follow.

Brenton will likely be quite incapacitated in the months preceding his death. He will find moving about very difficult and painful, and may be confined to a wheelchair. He’ll likely be nauseous from chemotherapy and other treatments. He’ll probably become incontinent and lose full control of his bowels. He knows this, not just from the words of medical professionals, but from firsthand experience. Brenton witnessed the very same things in the last months of his own father’s life, as he too endured the final stages of prostate cancer.

This experience had a profound effect on Brenton, and he believes he has never really got over the guilt of wishing his own father would die – to put both of them out of their pain and misery. It was years before those painful last memories of his father could be replaced by the thousands of fond memories of him from happier times. Despite this, significant guilt remains. He is terrified of putting his family through the same thing.

Like many people undergoing a similar experience, Brenton has an unwritten bucket list. However, his doesn’t include tandem parachute jumps, bungy-jumping, swimming with sharks or visiting exotic locations throughout the world. Brenton’s bucket list revolves around some of the things he might live to see, but many that will be beyond him. Most of all, it is exclusively family related.

He’d like to see his youngest son graduate from high school, and discover what career pathway he decides to pursue. He’d like to see me graduate from University and get my first full-time job. He wants to see more of his sons’ friends. He wants to see milestone birthdays. He knows it is highly unlikely that he’ll see his sons get married, but he’d like to be around when we have our first ‘serious’ girlfriends, just so he can see what we look for in potential partners. He’d like bury his mother; only so she doesn’t have to go through the pain of burying a son. Most of all, he’d dearly love the opportunity to grow old and cantankerous with Allison at his side.

That doesn’t seem like too much to ask. Sadly, it’s not something I can give.