Six years ago today, in the very early hours of the morning, we said goodbye to a legend. Today, I want to post something to possibly bring some awareness to Pancreatic Cancer.
He smelled of Old Spice aftershave and smokeless tobacco. You could spot him in a crowd in his Liberty overalls and his “brogans” typically with dog leash in hand with a big drooling bloodhound on the end of the leash; with a big ol’ smile across his face. He liked to call people by their first and last name, and would often say “This is Jackie Sheffield” when on the phone with friends and even family. He was a simple man, with simple dreams, who wanted to live his life doing the things he loved. I loved that man with all my heart :)
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I was sitting at my desk at the Journal, typing up articles for that weeks paper. It was July 25, 2011. Days before my 25th birthday.
My daddy had went to the hospital the night before. He’d had gallbladder surgery around three weeks earlier and he was still experiencing excruciating pain. Sunday night, they’d decided to keep him...acknowledging that that shouldn’t have been happening.
My mama called me that morning....around 11 a.m. I remember asking “What’s the latest? What has the doctor said? How’s daddy doing.” And my mama said hesitantly, “Well, they’ve found a mass on his pancreas.” Of course, my mind was going a mile a minute with questions like “What does that mean? Could it just be a cyst? What does that MEAN?” Mama just stated that the doctors didn’t seem to think that it was a cyst and she would keep me posted.
Doctors came and went. None of their news was positive.
The next day was one of the few times that Rheba and I didn’t go and visit daddy. Mama called me again on her way home, I could hear the tears in her voice. I will never forget her saying “Aleta, they think it’s pancreatic cancer, and they’ve told your daddy that he only has a year to live.”
Words cannot describe what I felt at that very moment.
People often ask me, “How did they find it?” Like a majority of cases, they found my daddy’s too late. His had already spread to his liver by the time they found it. At that point, there was nothing that they could do. Chemo would only be a manner in which to prolong his life, it would never cure the cancer.
Here is what my daddy experienced: He lost a major amount of weight; he had pain in his right abdominal side; he got very sick when he ate; and I can remember him sitting in his recliner with his shirt off and actually seeing a lump on the right-side of his stomach. All of these can be symptoms of problems with your gallbladder, which is precisely why they didn’t catch it quicker...as daddy said, “Everyone at the hospital, including the janitor, told me it was my gallbladder.”
Watching a man that you thought could conquer the world go from being a very robust, active man become a very pained shell of the person that he was is a very hard process. I will say here that pancreatic cancer is a very painful cancer. Dad couldn’t eat, couldn’t even stomach the smell of food, he couldn’t get comfortable sitting. His liver was so swollen that when they went to put in his feeding tube, they said that he wasn’t able to eat because his liver was literally pressing on his stomach. I won’t get into all that we faced, but it was very, very difficult. Nothing...Nothing prepares you to hear your daddy telling the doctors “I just want to live...I just want to live.”
I pray to God that one day they find a cure. For now, the only hope they really have is early detection and the Whipple Procedure. I pray the find answers in the upcoming years. I never want another family to face what we went through. Pancreatic cancer just sucks.
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