Things more or less just moved along until around mid November 1996 when Martha and I first noticed that something was very wrong with her. It happened one day when we were outside a pharmacy waiting for a prescription to be filled. Martha and I sat down on a low curb and when I got up, Martha couldn't! I had to help her up because her lower back hurt her so much. Since about 1986 Martha and I had been seeing doctors at the Riverside County Hospital. Martha always complained about lower back pain and the doctors had told her that it was just arthritis. She also had diabetes which was controlled my oral medication and also required her to see the doctors on an average of once every two months.

Martha was trying to lose some weight and was dieting so I didn't really pay much attention to her weight loss but I did notice that it seemed to be happening quite quickly though. Her weight loss seemed drastic.

It was shortly after the first of the new year was when things took a turn for the worse. Between January 7, 1997 and mid February Martha had been to the emergency room at the hospital several times because of the terrible pains in her lower back. On one occasion the doctor in the emergency room didn't even check her at all and refused to give her any pain medication. He told me, as I stood outside the exam room where Martha laid in great pain, "I'm not going to make a drug addict out of her!" I couldn't believe my ears! I just stood there in disbelief thinking about punching that doctor right in the mouth! I didn't, but he will never know just how close he came to having to make an emergency dental appointment! During this time period Martha had been x-rayed several times, had an MRI, blood-work, nuclear bone scan and many doctor's appointments. Then on February 22, 1997 Martha had a seizure as she laid in bed at home. This scared me to death! I thought that she was going to die right there!

I called my mother, who lives right down stairs from our apartment, to come up and help me. Although she was in her eighties she got up to our apartment very quickly. Meanwhile I had called 911 and an ambulance was on it's way. When the fire department and paramedics arrived they checked her and when I told them that Martha was diabetic they checked her sugar level. It turned out that her sugar level was only 13! They put Martha on an IV of glucose and put her in the ambulance. I followed the ambulance to the to the closest hospital, Moreno Valley Community Hospital, which was only about five miles from our home.

When they opened the ambulance doors I was standing there. Martha seemed to be more or less back to normal and the seizure had stopped. The emergency room doctor and nurses monitored her blood sugar and, because of the glucose IV, Martha's sugar level was back to normal. The nurses gave Martha some juice to drink and a small sandwich to eat. After about two hours they released Martha and I drove her back home. This was one of the most frightening times in my life!

After this frightening experience I thought that things would get better but they didn't. As we were soon to find out, this was just the beginning. Since Martha's back pains seemed to be getting worse we took her to the county hospital's emergency room to see if they could do something. They took x-rays of her lower back and could see something down by her sacrum (tail-bone). They didn't know if it was just a bad x-ray or what so they scheduled Martha to get an MRI.

About a week after Martha got her MRI the doctors wanted to do a needle biopsy of what they thought was a tumor that was growing completely around her sacrum. It took about another week before they had the results. That day when they gave us the results was like getting hit with a nuclear bomb! Cancer! The most feared illness on the face of the earth! The doctors wanted Martha to be admitted to the hospital so that they could try and figure out where the cancer had started. We agreed and I stayed with Martha until late that night to keep her company. Once Martha was asleep I drove home. When they admitted Martha they put her on a morphine drip to help her control the massive pains she was suffering. This seemed to help somewhat but as we were to learn shortly, being on morphine does have it's side-affects.

Around 10PM on the third night Martha was in the hospital I got a call from Martha's nurse. She told me that Martha was going to have to be restrained because they had caught her sitting on the edge of her bed smoking and talking about seeing her cat in the room with her. Oh God, I was so frightened! I didn't know what was happening to our happy little world, which seemed to be falling apart.

I told the nurse not to restrain her and that I was on my way to the hospital to see if I could help Martha so she wouldn't have to be strapped to the bed (I knew that this would really bother her). My daughter and I quickly got dressed and drove the fifteen miles to the hospital. When we got there we put Martha into a wheelchair and took her outside to talk with her and try to explain that what she though she had seen was only a 'dream' brought about by the morphine. We spent about an hour together talking with Martha and finally got her calmed-down enough so that she might be able to get some sleep without being restrained.

After my daughter and I took Martha back to her room and put her into bed my daughter left. I spent the night either sitting on a chair next to Martha's bed or on the empty bed next to her's. I only went to sleep after I had made sure that Martha was resting quietly. Believe me, it was a very long night for all three of us!

Martha was in the hospital for one week, during which the doctors couldn't find where her cancer had started. All we knew was that she was Stage-4, terminal. The doctors only gave Martha a few months at the most to live. After her stay in the hospital Martha had four radiation treatments but couldn't continue because of the massive pain she was in. The doctors didn't want to give Martha chemotherapy because they said that it wouldn't do her any good and that it would only make her pain worse.

During this time Martha was a real trooper! She didn't complain even though she knew that she was dying. She was back home with me and I took care of her. We even had a visiting nurse come-in two or three days a week to help Martha. Martha tried her very best to do for herself even though she couldn't. She gave it her best effort though. In the face of death she showed real strength.