What doctafill said!!

You are the gracious warrior conquering the monster. Don't let up. You are a hero. Please take care. You are not alone.

I so appreciate you and your willingness to divulge what you know. It's no small task to think about what you know and experience, order it into cohesive paragraphs and write the words that invite us to read them.

Thank you,
Judy

It seems that empathy comes with experience. It has been easy for many of us to pooh-pooh the effort of "keeping weight on". It occurs to me that ageism results from that very thing: lack of experience. It takes a bit of age (experience) to become aware and to develop empathy.

Importantly: You are helping the rest of us who have not yet faced such serious health issues. Hopefully, we are gaining from your experience.

With each day that you "keep on", just think (if you have a spare brain cell left over!) of how many of us want you to keep on keeping on.

Sending gentle hugs your way.

That all sounds so familiar! Hard to believe it's all now two years behind me.

I had two pill boxes too (in the kitchen) and a third in the bathroom. Lists of when to take what were taped to the inside of the cabinet door. I often thought that if my mental capacity were the least bit impaired, I'd never have kept it all straight.

I lost weight too. Mainly because all my food tasted bad (or at least abnormal) and because often I was having to eat only stuff that was easy on my stomach. I welcomed the weight loss (20 lbs), but sadly it all came back. My problem was drinking enough. I always kept a drink at hand, but still ended up in the hospital one night due to dehydration. Thereafter I went to the infusion lab several times a week just for fluid infusions.

Also, you didn't list all the trips to the doctor, infusion lab, etc., and having to schedule everything around those, not to mention finding someone to drive you if you couldn't do it yourself. My drive was 45-60 min, one way. I came to think of it as just "commuting" to my "job" like anybody else (particularly when I got into the six weeks of daily radiation treatments). On my GPS I listed the address as "work."

Makes you wonder, doesn't it, how some people manage to parent and hold down jobs AND deal with cancer treament.

Illness does steal your time. Not only in dealing with the medication and going to the doctor's office, but the hours each day that you aren't feeling well and need to just sit.

I don't have nearly the number of pills to take each day that you have to deal with, Ronni, but the ones I do take would be forgotten sometimes if I didn't have a timer. I keep a timer beside my computer (where I spend most of each day.) and when I take one batch of pills I set time timer to remind me to take the next ones.

My pill boxes are in different colors; one for morning, a different color for noon, etc.

Another tip is to check the medication to see if I am getting low on a prescription when I fill my pill containers.and then calling for a refill at that time.

By the way, for those of you who don't know, the kitchen and bathroom are the worst places to store medicine. I keep mine in a rack over the inside door of my linen closet.

Ronni, I understand and just have severe arthritis and now knees going. Knee replacement do not know if much good at my age. A lot of pain and choosing at the moment no pain medication as 3 weeks ago tried Tramadol and passed out, ER and thankful nothing broken.
I drink Ensure twice daily with ice cream to help keep weight on. Continually moving like they tell and along with rest. I am fortunate that it did not begin downhill until 78
and now just turned 83.

Ensure Plus has extra calories and vitamins

Milk shakes and smoothies and whatever tastes good

And please get someone in at least once a week to clean the house and help however you need it.

You will feel better if some of the household tasks are done and take take good care of you.

I agree with Susan R, that exhaustive as your list is, there is always more to do. And then something unexpected happens. I am mad that you and too many others have this struggle. Why is caregiving so undervalued? Thinking of resources spent on expensive medication commercials, pink parades, taking away health insurance, etc.. Getting co-ordinated help with this should be a right. You are brave and generous to tell your story. Sending you best wishes.

@Classof85: I hear you. I'm not there yet, but I can imagine being where you are. Sometimes choosing to bow out on your own terms looks like it will be the only rational choice.

There is one point to think about. You know your son and daughter best. You obviously care about them, and want to spare them a burden they couldn't handle. I expect they care about you, too.

Are there things you can do or tell them, now, before the issue arises, that will spare them from some of the grief and guilt of imagining you in a horrible distress that... maybe they could or should have done something to prevent, to relieve, to spare you? That's a burden I worry about putting on my kids, and I am trying to alleviate that as best I can. In part, I am trying to share some of the insights I have gained here. I've been trying to give them some sense of what it's really like to grow old. They're not ready to hear it, they don't have the experience to understand it yet, but I hope that later, when they need to know and can no longer ask me, they'll remember something of what I said.

Exactly how that might work, for your kids, is going to be very individual. Very specific to the exact relationship. It is a thing to think about, though.