A. The hard part was the unexpected nature of when somebody is going to need a lot of help. You can't really plan around that. My mother had cancer for a very long time and she was very functional during much of it. She had moved out here to spend time with her grandchildren, she had been driving my son to school, and I was working very, very hard in the transplant program. Then all of a sudden she developed a pelvic insufficiency fracture and wasn't able to stand. She had severe pain.
Another issue is how the cancer acts, where it goes to, and all that that's so hard to plan for. Even within the same disease, each cancer will take on an individual appearance. So first it was coming to the recognition of what happened and that we weren't going to be able to make it better, and then reorganizing our lives around that part.
No one tells you any of that. And when people are really sick, it's very hard for the patient and family members to deal with the inevitable end, so there are no preparations made. I see that in my own work -- I can talk to people until I'm blue in the face and mostly they don't really want to deal with that. So they end up kind of backing into it.
