UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2024

You may be interested to read the tribute I wrote that has now been posted on Science Care’s website:

https://www.sciencecare.com/memorial-tributes/thomas-mcqueen

It’s not an obituary, and it’s not a comprehensive life story, but I think it covers what was important to him and conveys a mix of seriousness and humor that characterized his personality. Their website combines paragraphs into one block of text, so I put little hearts at the end of each paragraph I wrote. It took awhile to get this done, because it was hard for me to get into the right frame of mind to put words to my thoughts.

Science Care sends a letter to each donor’s family describing in general terms their current programs, so they have some idea about the kinds of medical advancements the donation was a part of. The letter I received listed programs with medical device companies, medical universities, a pharmaceutical company, and a biotechnology company. The programs included surgeon training for total knee and hip arthroplasty, new surgical approaches to the head and neck, and repairing fractures of hand and wrist. Other programs included research on transdermal drug delivery, treatment of patients with acute heart failure, and development of Micro-CT imaging technology. Tom would have liked that, he had so many CT scans the past few years. 😀

ORIGINAL POST

So… I know everone wants to know what happened, and I know some of you already know some of it. But rather than explain everything over and over again to everyone, which I don’t have time for anyway, this will probably be my last blog entry on this stupid WordPress blog that keeps breaking and I haven’t figured out how to fix and which I don’t have time to try fixing either. And I’ve been in touch with so many people the past few days that I can’t remember who I told what, my thoughts are a bit scrambled right now, sorry.

First, a little background some of you may not know… about seven years ago Tom was diagnosed with clear cell renal cell carcinoma. There was a large tumor on one kidney, and they removed the tumor, kidney, and adrenal gland. Since then, he has been on several different kinds of chemotherapies (pills taken at home) and immunotherapies (IV infusion as an outpatient), which continued as long as the disease was stable, then when there was any sign of progression they would switch to a different drug.

Some of the drugs were worse than others, but they all had awful side effects (I won’t describe them all; I’m sure you can imagine). The worst one had the side effect of hand-foot syndrome which caused wounds to open on the bottom of his feet, so he couldn’t walk and had to use a wheelchair for a few months, and then the wounds also got infected and he needed more surgery. No doubt chemo drug side effects were the origin of that saying “the cure is worse than the disease.”

About the beginning of the year they discovered it had metastasized to his lungs. He gave it a lot of thought, and decided to stop the drugs, he had had enough of the miserable side effects. At that point, it was about quality of life rather than quantity.

A couple months ago fluid started accumulating around his lungs and abdomen, which eventually caused difficulty breathing and eating. When it got too bad every few weeks, he went to Emergency and had them drain the fluid, which put him pretty much back to normal for awhile. To celebrate (not!) his birthday on July 3, we went to Emergency again, but they drained so much fluid that it caused his blood pressure to drop and he had to stay in the hospital on IV blood pressure meds for a week.

He was discharged into hospice care, so they could put in a drain port and we could do the drain at home whenever needed, or have a hospice nurse come and do it. He was home for a week while everything was being arranged. On Wednesday his O2 was down to 75% so hospice delivered an oxygen machine, and the level came back up by the end of the day. That night he even got out of bed and made a phone call.

Thursday we spent the day together watching TV, talking about how he couldn’t wait to get back to work, and finalizing hospice plans (which were the next day they would pick him up at 8AM and go to the hospice clinic and have the drain put in at 9AM). He was positive and optimistic. He had meds to help his breathing at 3:00 and again at 4:00, so he relaxed well. About 5:00 I left the room to do the late afternoon chores, feeding cats, feeding dogs, feeding tortoises, getting garbage out and the bin at the curb for pickup the next day, locking the gate and doors, etc. I also had gotten some prime rib burgers which I quickly panfried to tempt him to eat more, and when I went back in the room to tell him about dinner, he was gone.

A few people have mentioned to me that they have seen that in the past, a dying person will wait until their caregivers have stepped out for awhile and they are alone. I had not heard of that before, but I do wonder if that is the case. I know that he didn’t tell me everything, to keep the worst details to himself and spare me, so that is a possibility.

It was certainly not a surprise, but somewhat of a shock because we had spent the day almost like normal. He was in no pain, not even having to take any pain meds. The actual end was quick, and he got his wish that he didn’t want to die in the hospital. After all the suffering from the damn chemo meds, at least he didn’t suffer so much at the end.

When he was in the hospital, he spoke several times with a chaplain about his personal relationship with God, which a few of you were privileged to talk about with him, so I know he had no fear or apprehension either.

He made a body donation to Science Care (like his mom a couple years ago), and at some point in time I will add a Tribute to their website (kind of like an obituary).

There are no plans for any type of memorial service. He’s not a fan of that kind of thing, and would prefer that everyone remember him in their own way. If you want to drink a toast to his memory, he wouldn’t say no to a Guinness (Guinness 0 for those with only one kidney!), a Manhattan, or a Gin & Tonic (Bombay Sapphire East or Tanqueray Rangpur please ;-).

I know some people like to do charitable donations in memoriam, so if that’s something you want to do, go ahead and donate to your favorite charity or consider one of Tom’s favorites:

• Greyhound Pets of Arizona – https://gpa-az.com/
• Hope For Paws – https://www.hopeforpaws.org/
• Also consider Hospice Of The Valley – https://www.hov.org/

(BTW, if you want to know how much Tom enjoyed being a foster family for greyhounds, Tom wrote a short essay on the gpa-az website. On their home page, scroll down to HOT ITEMS and read “A few words about fostering a Greyhound…”)

Thank you everyone for your thoughts, sympathy, prayers, and especially love <3. You can never have too much love!

Rita

(For those of you who don’t know me, my email is ritamcqueen@gmail.com)

PS, please feel free to pass this along to anyone you know who may be interested. I tried to tell everyone I could, but I know I don’t have contact info for everyone.

So I got the site backed up finally. WP said it was connected to my Google Drive, but that was a lie, and when I connected again it finally believed it. Then I updated everything WP said was old and needed updating. Now I have no media. The media page shows empty boxes where media used to be, and all the pages and posts where media used to be have text but that’s it. Sigh. I’m going to give up for today because that’s about all the aggravation I can stand for one day.

A warning would have been nice WP. Something like, oh I don’t know, hey if you update these things that we say you need to update, you will lose all your media, Are You Sure? At least give me a choice before things get broken. Yes, I ignored that old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Just when you get used to the site, you have to update and relearn how to do things. It has become kind of a pain. Maybe I should just go back to my plain vanilla HTML site. HTML is not that hard.

Yeah, I haven’t blogged in awhile. I need to download and install updates to the WordPress theme because the version I have installed throws errors now, thanks WP. My theme was working just fine, but what the heck let’s update stuff just for the hell of it OK?

And WP keeps updating itself to new versions. Before updating though, it is good practice to backup the site. Sigh. Now I have to try to get that done in between Cox (I so want to spell that a different way…) going down every hour or two all day long. Really, Cox, get it together. Everyone I ask has nothing good to say, everyone has the same problem.

So, I’ve been waiting to see a stable internet connection, and I’ve finally decided to just bite the bullet and try to get the backups and updates done. Wish me luck! If this site disappears, you have been warned.

Of course, right in the middle of entering ancestors in Sweden, I got sidetracked again. This time, volunteer indexing of Missouri death certificates, which took a few weeks. After 50 years, death certificates become public record in MO, and volunteers index the records and then the state puts them online for free research purposes. So that’s always a January project. It would be nice to get back to Sweden, but the laptop is acting up, so I think it’s time to take it in and get it checked out. I guess this is as good a time as any, kind of already at a stopping point. It seems like it’s always something, you know?

I had started making some progress on JWF Foeh, dug out some old software that had some old family files on it, and found his brother also living in Cook county. There is quite a bit of data online for that branch, so I started entering a new tree for them, but then I got sidetracked, as one frequently does in genealogical research, hah!

Now I’m in Sweden, but of course that has nothing to do with the C-A-T lines. In looking at some new information for hubby’s gr-gr-grandparents, I found some confusing surnames. Naturally, when you see names like Martinson, Pearson, Johnson, etc, you think of Swedish names, but then a lot of records turned up the name Moody. It seemed like gr-gr-grandma Bertha sometimes used the surname Pearson and sometimes used the surname Moody. Some Iowa church records came online, including Swedish congregations, and they had birth date and place for Bertha. Yay, looking up free resources from familysearch, and getting lots of helpful information from Swedish genealogists on reddit, got me back to Hallands county where all these ancestors lived, and all the free records on riksarkivet. So far, back to 5gr-grandparents born around 1700. Boy, those Swedes kept track of everybody. It does take awhile, though, to figure out what the records say because of the usual old and faded and sloppy handwriting, but now it’s in Swedish and Latin, sigh. And it’s not indexed, so it’s a lot of paging through old church books, but at least I can put on headphones and listen to something 20th or 21st century. I still have not figured out where the surname Moody came from though.

Hoping to finish up the direct line Swedish ancestors soon, so I can get back to trying to figure out German ancestors. 😃