i am not doing good today.  Most days I think I am, considering my loss is only a couple of months old.  But as we know, you can be doing fine and then the grief returns to throw you down the stairs.

I hate that I will never see Steve again on this earth but I can accept it.  Maybe it's the nurse in me but people get sick and die and that is life, as much as we don't like it.  We all know we are going to die some day.

No, what haunts and torments me is the way he suffered.  There is something absolutely diabolical about a slow, hideous death from cancer.  In the end, he had a tumor on his upper inner arm that made it impossible for him to put his arm at his side.  That is torture!  He became so painful that you could no longer hug him without causing him pain.  He was on high doses of Fentanyl, OxyContin and Tramadol as well as lidocaine patches and rubs.  He also had radiation several times to shrink the tumors for the lone purpose of pain relief.  With the laws in this country surrounding strong narcotic pain medicine it is not always easy to obtain these drugs from retail pharmacies (and his insurance wasn't accepted at he hospital pharmacy.  The retail pharmacies, at least in my State, are only able to dispense so many narcotics per month per store so he last week of the month was always a problem.  On Memorial Day weekend I went to 7 different pharmacies and no one could or would dispense OxyContin.  I pretty much had a meltdown until someone would help me and hey, I would do it all over again if that is what I had to do.  My husband was dying and suffering and I couldn't get anyone to help me........the pharmacists have been intimidated by the strict rules about dispensing narcs.  I have been a nurse helping patients for decades and I never imagined I would be in a situation where the doctor wrote a legitimate prescription that I would have to beg and scream and barter and cry in order to get it filled.  I do understand that there is a prescription drug epidemic out there and a heroin epidemic out there.............really, I truly do.  Finally, I learned that you have to take proof of the illness (a biopsy report and some MD notes) and request to meet with both the store and the pharmacy manager and then it gets easier to get these scripts filled but at first I did not know that.......how would I have known that?  In my job as a nurse the scripts were filled by the facility pharmacy, not a retail pharmacy that anyone with a prescription can walk into.  As his wife who just happened to also be a nurse I felt like I HAD to make sure he got the pain medicine the doctor ordered.  And I did, every time, but it was absolutely exhausting sometimes because I was fighting cancer myself at the time and didn't always have great energy to be fighting every pharmacy in town.  Finally, when he got on hospice the meds became very easy to obtain but by then he was barely conscious.  I don't think anyone could have fought more valiantly for him than I did but still, sometimes I fear I failed him because despite my every effort, sometime he did miss a pill or two because it was due at 2pm but the pharmacy would not have it until 5pm.  I told his cancer doctors but they had no power over the retail pharmacies and his insurance was not accepted at the hospital pharmacy.  I know they are trying to prevent people from getting addicted to narcotics and overdosing but there has GOT to be a better system in place for people dying of cancer who need these meds.  This has been a very long post......my longest one yet......but I am still very upset over this.  Sylvia