Pizza Party!

So, yesterday was a really good day for Wes!  It started just before lunch time when the nurses woke him to get him ready for the day with his meds and other goodies and usually he goes to sleep immediately after his lunch, but not yesterday.  This time he was wide awake for a couple of hours so we went through some of the family albums that Nic had brought from home.  Fortunately most of my albums are in binder form so I could literally pull out pages and he could hold them and look at them for as long as he wanted.  It was nice watching his face study those pages from way back when, pictures of him with hair, with a baseball cap (he couldn’t wear them anymore after his first brain surgery) and lots of him with his boys, sliding down snow hills, camping, celebrating many Christmases and riding dirt bikes.  Lots of good memories that made him smile.

I had been encouraged by the palliative nurse to fill the room with memories to share with him, pictures or items from home.  And slowly we are doing that.  She also encouraged us to bring our grandchildren along on this journey, she suggested that families often have a popcorn & movie night or a pizza party and so when Tina contacted me that afternoon and asked if they could come when papa was awake that evening I suggested having a pizza party as an early supper.  Everyone was pretty pumped!  I cancelled his food tray and sent Nic around to pick up some special treats for the kids (I always had a kinder egg or something like that ready for them in their little tin baskets at our place when they would come to visit and when they were ready to go home they could ‘empty’ their basket and take their treat home, definitely a tradition we want to continue here in the hospital), I also sent Nic to DQ for an ice cream log cake for dessert, one of Wes’ favorites.  I made a sign for the door that said,

Private Pizza Party in Progress

Please come again!

The pizza came and the party started!  What a blast!  Wes enjoyed every minute of it!  The kids were silly and funny and drew papa more pictures, they puzzled and laughed and prayed with Papa. 

We don’t get these days often enough when he’s able to enjoy having the noise of his loving little family around him, but, he was able to do that yesterday and we are so very grateful!

Later on that night the nurses were here to get him ready for bed and one of the nurses, that was new to me, noticed one of the drawings that Kinsley had done for papa because it was hanging on the bathroom door.  She looked at it and said, “Wow, you have a real budding artist there!”  I laughed, not really thinking anything of it.

She continued, “Yeah, my kid can barely draw a circle.  If he makes a card I have to write a description on it so people know what it is, but this one you can tell that’s a dog and a star!”  I was glad it was dark in the room because I suddenly realized what she was talking about.  I had drawn the dog and the star on Kinsley’s paper.  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was this 55 year old grandma that had drawn the mangy looking dog and the uneven star that does look like a 3 year old drew it! I laughed pretty hard after they left.  I love these nurses!

But, it did get me to thinking.  Sometimes in life we think we know what we are seeing and we make assumptions about people or situations when in reality we don’t know what’s really going on and sometimes it’s not worth explaining because in the grander scheme of things I’m not sure all those little things matter.  Like my granddaughter’s, er, my drawing.

There is no one, except the nurses & my kids, who really know what goes on behind Wes’ door.  I choose to share only bits and pieces of our world with you, but, not everything needs to be shared and right now I choose to say, “That’s ok!”

Wes’ door may have signs that say, 5 minute visits or please be quiet patient sleeping.  Or maybe like today, no visitors & patient is sleeping, because today when I asked Wes if he wanted to see visitors he shook his head no.  Today, like most days he wants to sleep and that’s alright. I hope that people will understand that.  And when he’s sleeping I’ve been advised by the doctors not to wake him for visits, it takes too much out of him to wake up and focus on people and added conversations.  And so we have our quiet days, which I truly enjoy.  I call those our ‘smile’ days because mostly when he does wake up he smiles and that’s good enough for me.  
We’ve had a few ‘drop ins’ today and when I ask Wes if he wants to see anyone he slowly shakes his head ‘no’ and I need to respect his wishes and I hope you can understand that.  It's nothing personal, it's just the way life is right now. That’s the chance that visitors take, tomorrow may be different, but, bottom line, it’s Wes’ call.  End of story.

One of the palliative nurses reminded me yesterday, “When everything is said and done you don’t want to look back and remember what you did for everyone else during ‘his’ time, its more important that you know that you did everything you could to honor his time and his wishes.” 

And that’s a part of a much bigger picture.