So part of this is dedicated to my stepfather, Jack Sabatke. Jack met my mother in 1962 and they were married three years later. My mother died April 30, 1979. You can read her story here.

Jack died after a lengthy battle with lung cancer. We found out in November 1999 that he had an inoperable tumor wrapped around his aorta artery going into his lungs, and were told to gather the family together for Thanksgiving because he may not make it to Christmas.

My sister and I began making the necessary telephone calls to his brothers and sisters that still live in Merrill and asked them to come down to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving. Jack was one of eight children borne to Leslie & Ella Sabatke, Sr.

We all knew that this was going to be very hard on all of us, but we began to make the holiday meal arrangements. Well somehow we made it through Thanksgiving and Christmas even though dad had to go for chemotherapy and radiation treatments every day until Dec. 31, 1999.

Right after the holidays were over he received a good report from his oncologist that his tumor had shrunk. Everyone celebrated. It seemed as though our prayers had been answered. But our excitement began to fade in late February when he began to experience some shortness of breath and his lymph nodes in his neck and under his left arm began to swell. The doctors did see anything to get overly excited with at the time and told him not to worry. All of his tests were okay.

He continued to experience shortness of breath on a few occasions and eventually had to be hospitalized because of it as a precaution. He was released the next day and continued with his life.

The seasons continued to change and with them brought change in him too. By late July he had begun to experience more and more problems and went back for some more tests of which the reports said that the tumor had began to grow again. The doctor told him to go home, smoke all the cigarettes he wanted, drink all the alcohol he wanted and to contact hospice because he only had 3 months to live at this point. Well Dad being the man that he was, neither he nor his girlfriend, gave up hope. JoAnn had seen an article in the Oklahoma City newspaper about a cancer research doctor that had been having good results with some experimental medications so they made an appointment to see him. This was early August. After several treatments and several tests, the reports that he began to receive were all good. They would tell him, "Jack, your tumor is shrinking!" Jack and JoAnn continued with this "treatment" that this doctor had placed him on and all was good with the world.

Bull-crap if it was! One day in September, Jack had developed a nosebleed. One bad enough to be transported by ambulance to a bigger hospital because our local hospital could not control the bleeding. They got it under control in the emergency room at St. Mary's hospital in Enid, Oklahoma and was released to come home. Later that night he was transported back to Enid because he began to hemorrhage again. He spent 3 nights in the hospital this time.

The day before he was released, I met my sister there at his room after I found out that he had refused to have a MRI done earlier that morning. Well with me being a nurse, my sister and I had convenienced him to sign papers so that I could look at the reports of the tests that he had done so that I could explain the results to him. He did sign the papers and I went to the nurses station to retrieve the mysterious papers. The floor supervisor remembered me from when I had worked at the hospital and just handed me the chart.

After finding and reading the reports I nearly had a heart attack myself. My stepfather's cancer not only had grown, but it had metastasized into his bones and his brain. And now I had the awful duty of informing my sister and him of my findings. I feel that I must also tell you that my stepfather and I have never had a good relationship, and more times than not, he would tell me to quit coming around him because I reminded him too much of my mother. He and my sister were really close. He was her stepfather also, but neither one of them felt that way. They were father and daughter. So this task was not going to be easy for me to do. I had always been the outsider and more so after my mothers death. But now I must be the sister that my sister needed and the daughter that he needed for me to be.

I choose not to tell him that day about my findings in his medical record, but I did tell Sandi what I had found to prepare her for what we needed to do next. We left the hospital and I returned the next day to bring him home. It was then that I choose to tell him about my findings. I did this because we were alone and we could hopeful talk about a few other things that we needed to talk about. We got some of them out in the open, but not all of them. I also did this because he had a return appointment to see the doctor in Oklahoma City at the research center coming up and I told him that he didn't need to see him anymore because it wasn't doing him any good. He agreed to contact Hospice and start working with them to control his pain even though he continued to deny being in any pain at all. Now I'm going to try and make the story a little bit shorter. I felt as though I had to write all of the previous stuff..

Hospice came in and began to work with him. But he just wouldn't give up hope. His primary care physician told us we had to take his hope away from him in. Well, how do you take someone’s hope away from them? He kept on believing in the doctor in Oklahoma City that told him that he was getting better. He began to lash out at me more again. That was easy for him to do and that was okay for me because that meant that he wasn't hurting my sister.

You see, the part that I'm having a hard time with here is that he use to beat the hell out of us kids and our mother all the dang time. Did I want him to die? Yes I did. I hated him that much for what he had done to us over the years. But I never wanted him to get cancer! I wouldn't have wished that on my worst enemy and believe me, he was my enemy. My mother died from cancer and I had seen what it did to her and some of the patients that I have taken care of in my time as a nurse.

I use to believe that God gave my mother cancer to get her out of the hell that she was living with Jack. I blamed Jack for her death. I will always hate him for the things that he did to her and to us kids. Even after I was grown he continued to try to abuse me every chance he got. He continued to verbally abuse me every chance he got. Telling me how worthless I was and then would turn around and DEMAND that I do something for him. I would just take it until I had enough, then I would tell him to get over him damned self and to call someone that actually cared about him. Then he'd go away for awhile until he needed me to do something for him again.

I am trying to FORGIVE him for what he had done to us, but I never will FORGET. The physical abuse stopped when I was 17 years old. That's when I learned to stand up for myself and tell him where and how to put it. The verbal abuse never stopped though.

The day that he died in the hospital, I had one more talk with him. He was in and out of consciousness, but I knew in my sole that he knew what I was saying. I took his hand and told him, "Daddy, I know that you are waiting for me to forgive you so that you can die with piece of mind, but I can't do that just now." I also told him that he just needs to let go and to let me deal with my own demons of not being able to forgive. I reminded him that he didn't want to live like this and to please please don't put my sister through any more hell than she's already going through. That was at 10:30 a.m., he died at 3:30 p.m. My sister and I had left the hospital and had went grocery shopping because some of his family was on their way down from Wisconsin to see him and we needed to get some things done. Yes, he was alone when he took his last breath. I had taken the one person that truly loved him away so she wouldn't see him die, my sister.

That's all to this story for right now. I will add more to it later as I go through my healing processes. If you don't mind, please leave me a message in my guestbook that is located here and let me know what you think about this.