Pogo Update

Here is an update on what has been going on with Pogo since his last blog, reported by his daughters Jessie & Lisa:

On July 7th Pogo was admitted to St. Lukes Hospital and has been there on the 12th floor of the Patient Tower ever since. In his last blog he spoke about how he was becoming weaker. His doctor thought it would be a good idea to keep him in the hospital and try to build back up his strength and tend to the many wounds he had been accumulating with his falls.

We were hoping to be able to do cyber or gamma knife surgery to attack his quickly growing cancer, but unfortunately it was deemed too risky. The surgeon believed that because there is more than one tumor and they are spread throughout the brain, the amount of radiation that they would use would more than likely cause radiation poisoning and would do him more harm than good. Therefore the only treatment option left for Pogo was chemotherapy.
Being the fighter that he is, he did accept two treatments of chemo. Unfortunately though his body continues to weaken and he has now lost all appetite and is completely bedridden. He has decided that he will stop the chemotherapy and no one can blame him. Once that decision was made, the next step was to select a hospice.

Admittedly hospice was almost a swear word to us when it was first mentioned, but we did not really understand much about what a hospice is other than a place where people die. We are very fortunate to have a beautiful hospice nearby (Aurora Zilber Family Hospice in Wauwatosa). A nurse from their facility was nice enough to come meet with Pogo and family at St. Lukes. Zilber is an 18 bed facility located on the Honey Creek Parkway. It is in a residential setting and each room is large and has a patio that the patient can be rolled onto without even getting out of bed. There are beautiful sunrooms, a playroom for Pogo's grandson to hang out in, a kitchen for families to cook together, a meditation room, and beautiful grounds to go for walks. Pogo and his family are very much looking forward to getting there. He is on the waiting list but it shouldn't be too long.

All that being said, we would like to encourage any friends or family out there who wish to see Pogo to come soon. We cannot say exactly how long he has left because of the unpredictable nature of his cancer. We do know that he is declining steadily and it is not clear how long he will still be able to talk or to know that people are visiting.

We will try to update with information on his hospice room once he gets there, but for now he is still at St. Lukes in Milwaukee, room S12134 of the Patient Tower.