My father, Roger Kramer passed away from lung cancer on June 2nd, 2019 after his 129 day battle. His cancer progressed quickly after his diagnosis on January 24th 2019. The cancer spread to his C2, eating away at the bone and fracturing his neck. After finishing chemotherapy and radiation, a PET scan t revealed the cancer had spread throughout his body. I was honored to care for him in his final days and he passed away 4 days later. We not only lost a father but Craig and I lost a dear friend and community member.

April 30th, 2019

I thought I would update everyone while dad is getting his feeding tube placed.

I’m up here in Lacrosse here today with Mom, Dad, Gannon and Buck. Kelli is watching the childcare kids today back home.

The shirt orders have been placed. 30+ kids shirts and 160+ adult shirts. We are organizing a pick up time at the Waucoma Fire Station for everyone to come and pick up their shirts this weekend. If you don’t feel comfortable paying online, that’s totally fine. You can pay when you pick up the shirt! I’ll work on shipping them this weekend as well.

Dad’s cancer has been moved from curable to treatable. That was our “big news” we found out yesterday. Which sucks. When we found out the cancer spread to C2 we kind of thought that would be the case.

Dad is getting radiation on his neck now – that is moving his radiation end date from May 8th to May 10th. We are all planning to go to Lacrosse with dad for his last day. If you’d like to come let us know!

Dad has STOPPED chemotherapy for the time being because it isn’t treating the cancer in his neck. It will need to be adjusted and restarted at a later time.

Dad had a rough night with pain. Lots of pain.

I’ve included pictures of dad’s neck CT to help explain what is going on. You can see the bone has a black center in it – the cancer has essentially eaten the inside of the bone making it very fragile – it should be dense but it is black in the imaging – hollow. Dad’s neck is fractured in more than one place which you can also see on the scan. The hope is this will heal after the cancer has been “zapped” out of it.

Dad will be up here at least a few more days. Surgery is not a good option at this time so he will remain in the neck brace for awhile. We need to get his pain under control before he can come home and he needs to be able to get up and moving around easier. Right now dad is on a continuous infusion and a PCA pump with a button he pushes to get more meds.

My mom has literally thousands of people around the country who read her blog every day and have for years. They have all asked how they can help and if they can donate. People have offered to set up GoFund me accounts. Mom and Dad are very uncomfortable with that but Kelli stuck a PayPal donation button on today’s blog post. We’ve tossed around the idea of hosting a benefit as well but again Mom and Dad are very hesitant. So many people want to help and if we can think of what we need, we will let you know. There’s just not much to do right now.

My brother in law is working on coordinating a shower to be installed in my parents main floor bathroom – this was always the intention but Dad will have trouble with stairs for awhile when he is in his neck brace so it is getting installed this week instead which will be awesome.

That’s all I know for now. Despite this all, Dad is in good spirits. We are all doing okay – as well as can be expected. He looks forward to visitors who have been in and out yesterday and today. Dad will have trouble getting out and about with his neck brace on when he gets home so we would love visitors when we get discharged!

My father, Roger Kramer passed away from lung cancer on June 2nd, 2019 after his 129 day battle. His cancer progressed quickly after his diagnosis on January 24th 2019. The cancer spread to his C2, eating away at the bone and fracturing his neck. After finishing chemotherapy and radiation, a PET scan t revealed the cancer had spread throughout his body. I was honored to care for him in his final days and he passed away 4 days later. We not only lost a father but Craig and I lost a dear friend and community member.

April 29th, 2019

More bad news on the home front…

About 30 seconds after I posted last nights update on my Dad (literally, 30 seconds) we took dad’s brace off of his neck so he could scratch his beard. He went to lean back in the recliner and my dad broke his neck.

We didn’t know that at that second obviously- he said he needed to go in the ER and something was very wrong. He was in 10/10 pain the entire way. I sat in the back seat trying to keep his neck still on the way. The narcotics in the ER were hardly touching his pain.

So the bone that broke is again that C2 vertebrae where the cancer is eating the bone. Imagine a doughnut – the hole in the doughnut keeps getting larger from the cancer eating the bone making it so weak which is why his neck broke so easily.

Dad was taken by ambulance to Lacrosse so he will be up there for the next few days at least. A neuro surgeon will now be added to the team who will be reviewing his case today at the “cancer meeting” they have on Mondays.

In a normal person, they would likely have surgery and be placed in a halo but with the cancer component we just don’t know what’s going on yet.

Here’s my mom’s blog post on today’s events: https://www.joscountryjunction.com/from-bad-to-worse/

That was possibly the worst day. I’ll never forget that groan that he let out when he moved just so slightly. It wasn’t like he was trying to get up, he just honestly reached forward and then just groaned. Then he said, “I don’t know how you guys are going to get me in the truck.” We didn’t know what he meant. He meant to get to the ER even though they had just come home from there.

I held traction on his neck, Craig and mom held his hands to guide him. It was terrifying. Carver watched the whole thing. I sat in the back seat of the truck literally holding his neck in place for the longest 35 minute drive of our lives. Every bump, every curve – my arms ached by the time we pulled into town.

I said something on the way there that we were all thinking: “Do you think you broke it Dad?”

“Something isn’t right.”

I called ahead to the ER. We brought him in through the ambulance bay. My coworkers met us outside with a stretcher. Mom and I were relieved to have some help. He was so so uncomfortable. I was that annoying family member that kept asking for narcotics for him.

In hindsight, we should have called an ambulance.

This is one of the most traumatic experiences in Dad’s cancer journey for me and mom. We talk about it often.

Check back tomorrow for a continuation of the Fatherless Daughter series.

My father, Roger Kramer passed away from lung cancer on June 2nd, 2019 after his 129 day battle. His cancer progressed quickly after his diagnosis on January 24th 2019. The cancer spread to his C2, eating away at the bone and fracturing his neck. After finishing chemotherapy and radiation, a PET scan t revealed the cancer had spread throughout his body. I was honored to care for him in his final days and he passed away 4 days later. We not only lost a father but Craig and I lost a dear friend and community member.

April 28th, 2019 – 17:29

Well guys, there is no sugar coating this post so I’ll jump right in. Dad’s cancer has spread.

Dad had a PET scan back in February. It showed the cancer was ONLY in the right lung and the lymph node in his chest closest to the tumor. PET scans are not good at detecting brain cancer or metastasis to the brain because the brain is always active or lit up on a PET scan. So when dad was diagnosed in February he had an MRI of his brain as well to confirm the cancer was not in his brain. It was not in his brain.

Dad has been having really bad headaches lately. They seem to be progressing. Dad’s headaches got significantly better on Tuesdays and Wednesday’s when he was on big doses of steroids after his Monday dose of chemo. This concerned his doctors because brain tumors are typically responsive to steroids. Therefore they ordered the MRI of his brain which confirmed, again, that there was no cancer in his brain which was a relief.

When I took him garage sale-ing on Thursday he was in a lot of pain by the end of the day and could hardly move his neck. Friday was even worse.

Yesterday I got a call from my mom. She said dad was in the shower and really screwed up his neck. Dad explained that it felt like his head was going to fall off. I had never heard anyone describe a headache like that.
About 2 hours later I got another call from mom. Dad needed to go to the ER. His pain was too much.

My amazing co-workers in the ER at WMC took amazing care of him, got his pain under control for the most part and Dad was ordered a CT of the neck.
Dad’s cancer has spread to C2. This is the second vertebrae of his neck. The cancer is destroying this bone causing all of this pain and headaches. The PET scan didn’t pick it up because it was too close to the brain, the brain MRI didn’t pick it up because it was too far from the brain. The C2 allows dad’s head to turn side to side or pivot. No wonder he said he felt like his head was going to fall off.

Dad’s current chemo and radiation treatment does not treat this cancer. We *think* we have been told that he will go through radiation again to treat this but we aren’t sure.

Dad was in enough pain again today mom took him back to Lacrosse this morning. They put dad in a new neck collar to help with stability and pain relief which dad says he thinks is helping. They will need to do an MRI of the neck this week. That’s all we really know right now. We don’t have a plan or even really an official diagnosis but they were so happy with their ER visit today – they said everyone took such awesome care of them!
We do know that any time cancer spreads it isn’t good. We do know that the chemo and radiation he is on won’t treat this.

Dad is in a lot of pain. Dad still can’t eat or drink anything without first numbing his esophagus and then he can only drink milk shakes. Dad lost 7 lbs between Monday and Friday last week. There has been talk about placing a feeding tube but we don’t know that for sure either. He probably won’t be able to eat regularly again until June at the earliest even though his last radiation treatment is May 8th.

That’s about all we know. If we know more I’ll post again.

I absolutely love this photo of my dad from my wedding. He was halfway through his speech when it was taken. I am literally sick to my stomach when I remember that we never got a recording of his speech. It makes me physically ill to think about. We had a friend with a video camera that night who was supposed to be taping. The camera had died over the supper hour and he was charging it and missed his speech.

This post is hard to read. I wrote it while sitting on my parents couch across from my Dad who was minutes away from breaking his neck.

My mom called me from the ER to tell me so I could call the other kids. I could tell she was trying not to cry. It was a short and sweet phone conversation. I was totally shocked.

I hung up with my mom and burst into tears. I can still remember every bit of that moment. I looked at Craig and said “My Dad is going to die.” I can remember what I was wearing, I can remember pulling myself together, I can remember each conversation with my siblings telling them that the cancer had spread. It was late, we were all already in bed. It was a hard conversation. We all cried together.

Tune in tomorrow for another post from A Fatherless Daughter.

My father, Roger Kramer passed away from lung cancer on June 2nd, 2019 after his 129 day battle. His cancer progressed quickly after his diagnosis on January 24th 2019. The cancer spread to his C2, eating away at the bone and fracturing his neck. After finishing chemotherapy and radiation, a PET scan t revealed the cancer had spread throughout his body. I was honored to care for him in his final days and he passed away 4 days later. We not only lost a father but Craig and I lost a dear friend and community member.

Update from the Kramer house: April 23rd 2019

Dad can’t swallow anything more than water, milkshakes, pudding, or ice cream.

We have 11 more doses of radiation after today so this will only get worse. His esophagus is so fried from the radiation and to target the tumor that even water doesn’t go well at times.

If you know my dad you know he loves beer and there’s just no way it would be worth the pain or the sensation that you’re choking.

Chemo is every Monday and it hits him hardest on Wednesdays. He’s usually feeling *a little* better just in time to get chemo again. He gets dehydrated, has horrible headaches everyday, feels very unsteady when he stands up, and just feels like a “pile of rags” in general. This will all get worse before it gets better.

Dad gets an MRI tomorrow to rule out a brain tumor. He’s on oxygen most of the time now.

Mom’s tumor marker doubled from December. She’s on a special iodine free diet so she can have a full body scan after her PET scan from last week came back clear. They don’t know where the cancer could be growing. We are in limbo a bit between Mayo and Gundersen with her.

Anyway that’s us. It sucks. Cancer sucks. Not much more to it than that. We are so thankful for friends and family who have been driving dad and sending cards.

Dad loves reading the comments so feel free to leave him a note.

We would find out later that the reason he got so much better when he got steroids was because it was an anti inflammatory and was actually treating the pain in his neck thus relieving his headaches. He would end up on heavy steroid doses for the remainder of his life.

Dad’s MRI would come back clear reiterating again that there is NO brain cancer – we were all relieved but Dad was still having headaches. If the MRI would go just a few more inches down, it would see that cancer had eaten most of his C2 vertebrae leaving it vulnerable to a break.

That’s all in a post for next week. Until then, thanks for reading.

My Dad died from lung cancer on June 2nd 2019.

I was doing okay. Actually, I was feeling guilty about how okay I was doing. And now I’m not.

Right around this time last year my dad started spiraling. His cancer went from curable to treatable to terminal when the cancer metastasized to his neck, he broke his neck, the radiation burned his esophagus so bad he couldn’t even eat, needed a feeding tube and was in uncontrollable pain. It was traumatizing to witness such a strong man whither away.

I feel weird admitting that it was traumatizing. Who am I to be traumatized by someone else’s pain and suffering? What gives me the right to claim someone else’s story? But that’s how I can describe it: traumatizing.

I’m at peace with his death. The actual dying process was quite peaceful and I wouldn’t have pictured it any other way. The actual death wasn’t hard compared to the struggle and the suffering of those last 6 weeks.

That feeling of anxiety and desperation and hopelessness…it creeps back and I feel it rise up in my chest, into my throat and just like that it takes me back and I’m back at the hospital in Lacrosse with Dad in my mind, following the doctors out of rounds, pulling them aside and asking how long Dad has left to live. Mom and Dad didn’t know I was asking them that. I don’t think Dad ever knew that I asked his doctors about his prognosis in the hallway outside of his room. I knew it was bad. I didn’t know how bad. They told me 11 months. It wasn’t months, it was weeks.

I ordered flowers for Dad’s headstone, Carver and I paid a visit to the cemetery the other day. We raced out to his gravestone to see who could touch it first. Who would have thought last June that it would be possible to laugh like that. Before we left, Carver said, “Me miss you Papa Moo. Me loved to play cards with you. You’re in ours hearts.”

So as the anniversary of his death approaches, I’m going to be hosting a blog post series, helping me process the grief and anxiety of those final weeks. Everything happened so fast, we were living one tragedy and dose of bad news to the next. That will start tomorrow, April 23rd: the beginning of the end.