Few situations are more agonizing than watching a spouse slowly fade. Yet families who can utilize the little time they have left can transfuse the misery with meaning.
One autumn day nine years ago Mutty Kiss of Monsey New York noticed a swollen lump on the underside of his jaw. His dentist and oral surgeon couldn’t find anything so he made an appointment with his general practitioner who sent him for CT scans and then to an oncologist. The oncologist thought it might be Hodgkin’s disease.
“That Friday night we didn’t sleep. My husband thought It’s over” his wife Randy Apt remembers.
That Monday the Kisses went to see the Tosher Rebbe in Montreal Quebec for brachos and chizuk. What followed was a whirlwind of hospital hopping biopsies and meeting with experts in an attempt to diagnose Mr. Kiss. Doctors finally determined he had poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma a cancer of epithelial tissue but they never pinpointed the primary origin of the disease.
Over the next few months Mr. Kiss underwent multiple chemotherapy treatments. The following winter difficulty breathing prompted doctors to perform a tracheotomy and place a breathing tube in his neck. The tube which made breathing easier compromised Mr. Kiss’s speaking abilities and after the tracheotomy he lost a lot of weight and his condition deteriorated slowly.
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