Kevin Hayes

About Kevin Hayes

After nearly 35 years of pre-hospital emergency medicine I thought I had experienced or seen it ail.  Physical traumas, emotional traumas, mass casualty incidents, the stuff you see on the news.  Patients and families had life changing events every day.  Consoling a family or friend of a sick or injured patient, sharing the bad news.  It was the norm, part of the job.

Until I came home to be told "Honey, I have lung cancer. I go in Monday for a Pet Scan." Boom just like that. 

The healthiest, most adamant proponent of holistic living, Chiropractor, Nutritional Consultant has lung cancer.  How is this possible?

We took the weekend to let tis news settle and come up with options depending on how the results came back.  The decisions we needed to make, just in case.

Do you have a will?  Do you have life insurance? How do we tell your family, my family, our friends, your colleagues, do we tell them? How good is your insurance? All these things that one just lets go by day by day in the normal life.  Yet our life isn't normal anymore.

The results weren't good, stage 4.  Lung, pelvis, lymph nodes.  Ok, Here we go.  Now come the decisions.

I think one of the hardest things for me as the husband and caregiver was that I had to come to terms that this wasn't my fight.  She had to be comfortable in the decisions.  It is HER body.  If it was me would I have done things differently?  Probably.  But they weren't my decisions to make.  Yes, I shared in the results of the decisions. I was hard to realize my biggest job was to be her support 100% and believe in her choices.  

SHE chose to take a very holistic approach.  Follow her belief system.  Her life style.  Support HER every step and be there if something changes.  And it did.

It metastasized to  he spine, immediate radiation treatments, a back brace to support her and now another decision to be made.  More testing and conventional therapy.  I've never seen a look in her face like the one when she said k to chemo.  "Are we really going to the dark side?" " I failed my profession and my beliefs and everything I've worked for."

The litany of chemo combinations we tried are uncountable.  Finally coming to  he point of trial chemo.  Unproven experimental chemo.  Which, once the correct dose was found, actually worked.  But the side effects were almost as bad as the cancer.  They worked for a while and then they stopped. So now what/  Nothing else is available.

So now we wait.  How long?  Days?  Weeks? Months? 

We got thru another Christmas and New Years.  And then things got worse.  As if a switch was flicked the cancer went crazy.

And then she died.  In my arms with her head resting on my chest.

I don't write this to boast.  I write this so you can understand that I've been there.  I'm not the only one.

So when did the grief start?  Is there a thing called pre-grief?  Do you start to grieve as the person you love goes through everyone of of these events?  

I was blessed to have someone to love.  Someone, who as a teacher, taught me ways to "handle" these events.  Respond rather than react.  Yes, I grieve.  I still grieve everyday.  The difference now is that I choose how I grieve.  It took a lot of work and time.

As we all have.  I have suffered the losses, the traumas, the grieving.  And I'm here to tell you there is hope, there is a future.

I invite you to walk with me.  I will help you respond, not react; process and adjust and believe the you can and will move forward.

We are all a work in process - learning, feeling and developing. I personally walk this path everyday and will for the rest of my life.  And I am here to walk with you so you may move through each day experiencing  peace and embodying the best version of yourself.