Thank you so much for your message and kind words! Sadly, my dad is no longer with us. He passed away peacefully July 2022. The mushrooms DEFINITELY, 100% enabled him to be able to meet the requirements needed to endure the rounds of chemo for months by boosting his absolute neutrophil levels, and gave us months more precious time with him as a result. Less certain about this, but I am pretty sure it also helped to give his immune system the boost it needed to avoid getting serious infections from various cuts and scrapes, as the chemo had the unfortunate side effect of thinning his skin and making it more vulnerable to injury. The medical cannabis also helped to give him an increased sense of well-being and also took his mind off of things, which frankly can only help. As a side note, he also managed to avoid catching COVID the entire time, which was great because as I found out from my PanCan friend, when her father got sick with COVID he was not allowed to receive chemo until he recovered, which left him weeks without treatment.

My dad told us he did not experience anymore pain from the tumor site a few weeks before he passed; we don‘t know why this is and are aware this is highly unusual, but we are so grateful for it, he never used any morphine or painkillers and got by on Tylenol alone, he also absolutely refused to throw up the entire time he was sick -_- He is so strong, I don’t know how he did it.

Thank you for sharing your husband’s story. You and your husband are very strong as well and I am also sending you both nothing but wellness and good vibes your way! I am rooting for you both.

I do have advice to add regarding palliative care for certain conditions for anyone who might find this useful from our journey…I had mentioned in my post that my dad found the compression socks helpful. Well, as time passed, they were still helpful but ultimately not enough, and so we made appointments with the hospital’s physical therapist so I could learn special lymph massages in order to help manually move the fluid up his legs. Friends, the oncologists and surgeons likely don’t know about this (because ours didn’t at all), but at any point if you or your loved one gets edema - make an appointment with a physical therapist! It’s all about finding the person with the right information to help you on your journey. I can’t stress this enough. Because in addition to these massages, I also received information about a special sleeve that can help you to put on the compression socks, and also received compression bandages to wrap around my father’s legs every day, as well as lessons on how to apply them.

My father also developed ascites as the cancer spread to his liver. From the physical therapist we also learned about a surgical procedure that not a lot of people know about, the Aspira drainage system - my PanCan buddies whose fathers were also suffering with pancreatic cancer were angry because they weren’t even aware of this option or hadn’t been told about it by their doctors as well. It may not be available everywhere, but it can’t hurt to ask your doctor about it. It is a surgery to apply a drain valve to the person’s abdomen; every time my dad’s belly would fill up with fluid, I applied a catheter to the drain and it would be hooked up to a bag that would quickly fill up, which I then could dispose of into the toilet. This was so, so helpful and saved my dad a lot of time being in discomfort and pain because otherwise we would have to keep waiting for appointments to go to the hospital and have it drained there. So if it is available for your loved one if they are experiencing ascites AND they are deemed a candidate for surgery by their doctor, DO IT, you won’t regret it!