Duane D Johnson

My papa, Duane, had several years of suffering before he finally passed in august. He had multiple organ failure including heart, kidneys and lungs. He had COPD, diabetes, and hell seems like everything else but the ol man still got up every morning to go out to his garden or tinker on one of his many projects.

On July 29th,09 we took him to the ER because he was having chest pains, he thought he was having a heart attack. Things settled down while we were there, we thought we would be going home when one of the nurses pushed on him stomach (you know how they do checking for who knows what) and he had some pain so they did an ultra sound on him and discovered there was cancer in his liver and they said it was medistatic (means it came from somewhere else). They did a few more tests and confirmed he had pancreatic cancer. That through us all for a loop. I live right next to him so I have been there my whole life. My mom and I were the ones who took care of him when he had been on his death bed previously, the old man was just to stubborn to die. I know it sounds terrible but when someone is suffering that bad you really get to the point where you just wish they would go. He was on 13 different pills. So, with that in mind, when they discovered he had cancer his primary care physician (my uncle) and our family decided it was best to take him off of him meds and let him go from organ failure. Anyone familiar with pancreatic cancer will tell you its a gruesome death. Its very painful and just horrible to watch someone go through. We all, including my grandpa decided it would be best to go from the organ failure, but the poor old man thought he had 5 or 6 months left. If you noticed the day he died compared to the day he was diagnosed, you'll see it was only 12 days of no meds before my grandpa passed away. Those pills were literally keeping him alive. We aren't for sure which organ failed, though we think it was the kidneys. There was no autopsy performed because we didnt need one.